Research: Materials with a disintegration time switch

Plastic bottles, empty cans and worn-out mobile phones. How can we prevent our planet from stifling in the garbage? To this day, recycling is the method of choice. But it is expensive: Most man-made substances are chemically very stable: to decompose them back into their components, one has to spend a lot of energy.
Materials that assemble themselves and then simply disappear at the end of their lifetime are quite common in nature. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany have now successfully developed supramolecular materials that disintegrate at a predetermined time – a feature that could be used in numerous applications (News Item TUM, 19 July 2017).
Click here for the news item.
Click here for more information about the NVC Project PUMA: the end of packaging as an environmental issue. You are welcome to join us for the next project meeting on 4 April 2018.

This news item is also included in our monthly overview, the NVC Members-only Update. If you have any questions, please contact us: info@nvc.nl, +31-(0)182-512411.