Tiny droplets, immense pressure — and plastics that can finally break down

Most plastics refuse to rot because of how their building blocks are bonded — so they crumble into microplastics instead. A team at Osaka Metropolitan University tried changing not the chemistry but the physics: they ran reactions inside droplets so tiny that surface tension squeezes their contents with immense 'Laplace pressure'. The squeeze unlocked parts of the building blocks that chemistry alone could not reach, letting the team make plastics with reliably degradable bonds — including from materials previously considered unusable. 'Our method could be used to develop environmentally friendly plastics that can be reliably degraded after use,' said Associate Professor Yukiya Kitayama, whose study appears in the journal Macromolecules. Better still, the trick needs no complex or specialised process — factories could adopt it as they are.

SDG 12 · Responsible consumption and production — Mechanism: tech innovation