Researchers have created an adhesive polymer that surpasses the strength of existing commercial options while offering the added benefits of being biodegradable, customizable, and reusable.
Researchers at Colorado State University and collaborators have created an innovative adhesive polymer that outperforms commercially available options in strength while also being biodegradable and reusable. The study, published in Science, highlights how the naturally occurring polymer P3HB can be chemically modified to serve as a durable and sustainable bonding agent.
Adhesives play a critical role in industries such as automotive manufacturing, packaging, electronics, solar energy, and construction, forming the backbone of a $50 billion market. However, they also contribute significantly to the growing problem of plastic waste. The research team employed a combination of experimental methods, simulations, and process modeling to design this eco-friendly polymer as a viable replacement for traditional adhesives.
The project was led by University Distinguished Professor Eugene Chen in the Department of Chemistry. Other partners on the paper include Gregg Beckham at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Professor Ting Xu at the University of California, Berkley and researchers from their groups.
Chen said that poly(3-hydroxybutyrate), or P3HB, is a natural, biobased, and biodegradable polymer that can be produced by microbes under the right biological conditions. While the polymer is not adhesive when made that way, his lab was able to chemically re-engineer its structure to now deliver stronger adhesion than the common petroleum-derived, nonbiodegradable options when used on various substrates or surfaces such as aluminum, glass, and wood. The adhesion strength of the re-engineered P3HB can also be tuned to accommodate different application needs.
Addressing the Global Plastic Waste Crisis
The findings are part of a larger goal by Chen’s group to improve and expand our ability to tackle the global plastics pollution crisis. His team is involved in many efforts to develop chemically recyclable, biodegradable and, overall, more sustainable alternatives to today’s plastic materials. He said that while many people inherently recognize the life cycle issues that come with a disposable water bottle, adhesives present more daunting issues with fewer potential solutions.
“Petroleum-based thermoset adhesives such as Gorilla Glue and J-B Weld, along with thermoplastic hot melts, can be very difficult or even impossible to recycle or recover – primarily because of their strong bonds to other materials,” he said. “Our approach instead offers a biodegradable material that can be used in a variety of industries with tunable or even higher strength compared to those options.”
Ethan Quinn is a Ph.D. student at CSU and served as a co-lead author on the paper with postdoctoral researcher Zhen Zhang. Quinn said he and Zhang led work around the creation and testing of the material.
“We developed a sample P3HB glue stick and were able to use it with a commercially available glue gun to test its application in sealing cardboard boxes and other properties on steel plates,” Quinn said. “I knew the data supported it being stronger than other options, but I was shocked that we were able to show that it far out-performs typical hot-melt options – holding up to 20 pounds in place compared to the 15 pounds an existing adhesive could not manage.”
Environmental Advantages and Future Commercialization
Chen said P3HB is biodegradable under a variety of instances, including managed and unmanaged environments. That means it will biodegrade naturally in landfills just as well as salty ocean water or soils, for example. That expands the range of possible options for dealing with the material at the end of its life cycle. The P3HB adhesive can also be recovered, reprocessed and reused.
The CSU team will now start work on ways to commercialize the polymer for broad use.
“We are working on two different approaches aiming for mass production, including ways to lower the overall cost and environmental impacts,” Chen said. “The analysis performed by the NREL team has identified key areas where we could make improvements, and we will continue to work with the BOTTLE Consortium on those scaling efforts.”
Reference: “Stereomicrostructure-regulated biodegradable adhesives” by Zhen Zhang, Ethan C. Quinn, Jacob K. Kenny, Alexandra Grigoropoulos, Jason S. DesVeaux, Tiffany Chen, Li Zhou, Ting Xu, Gregg T. Beckham and Eugene Y.-X. Chen, 16 January 2025, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.adr7175
The work done at CSU and NREL was supported by the Department of Energy’s BOTTLE Consortium.
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8 Comments
If the glue is biodegradable, I wouldn’t trust it for any long term applications, especially those exposed to the environment.
I agree. If I’m repairing something that I use all the time, I don’t want to keep repairing it. If I’m doing archival repair or re-assembly, I don’t ever want to touch it again. I’d probably opt for lesser strength if it won’t spontaneously self-destruct after 100 years and a day, like “The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay'” (aka “The Deacon’s Masterpiece”) of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
As to reducing the problem of plastic waste, it might exacerbate the problem of ‘micro-plastics’ if it is used in the assembly of plastic components because the finished product will dis-assemble more rapidly and produce more edges and corners to source the small particles.
There is a reason why so many ‘inventions’ are not commercial successes.
Your “biodegradable” label seems impossible. Cyanoacrylates usually last forever. I don’t get it.
I wouldn’t use an adhesive that is biodegradable but I’m sure there will be some use for it.
A biodegradable adhesive sounds like literally the last thing we want, but maybe in controlled situations, like food packaging, it could be useful. In the building industry, I expect it to find exactly zero uses.
It’s obviously not for more permanent jobs that may be exposed to the elements and nature, but for things like cardboard boxes and whatever may use hot glue (because the article states they used a regular hot glue gun to test it, so it’s therefore hot glue), instead of creating unrecyclable trash with used regular hot glue… this is a very good new alternative.
You may think regular hot glue may be reused. It’s just about melt the glue, right? Sadly, it’s not the case. The bonds are at best just holding enough. If there are contaminants, it wont be able to do anything.
For the uses of this new hot glue, I guess it’s anything you may use hot glue for and more (because it has a stronger bond)
Everything degrades. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Biodegradable just means it degrades through a biological mechanism (like bacteria) into non-toxic components. It doesn’t speak to the rate of degradation.
It would be nice if an article about a strong adhesive actually provided a value for its strength. 20lbs means absolutely nothing. Give me ksi or something.