As humans, we have been developing the capability to pursue new technologies that ease us the way to be more comfortable, productive or successful but, during the last decades, we are warned about the residues that our industries and lifestyle produces daily.
Chemical industry and thermosets specially, have been part of the focus to be able to reprocess, reuse or be recyclable due to the end-of-life of the products build-by or to manage losses from productive procedures.
Specially recyclable designed epoxy-based compositions can be produced with cleavable specific bonded reagents that potentially act as fuses for a disbonding-on-demand procedures, being tested in amine-capped hardeners, producing a thermoplastic polymer with toughening non-reactive functionality in epoxy systems.
In the other hand, and focusing on C-N bondings presents in most of the epichlorohydrin-amine formulations, larger usage in epoxy industries, a novel Zinc salt catalyzed solvolysis has been tested aiming to cleave epoxy from amine-hardener with the temptative to recover both reagents on its original structure.
For mercaptan hardeners and some cycloaliphatic epoxies with ester functionality on its structure, procedures with ionic liquids has been proved to cleave the esters.
Co-authors: S. Borrós, N. Agulló, J. Ferrer-Dalmau, S. Vilà, P. Ulier, F. Ripoll