Access to a wide range of plastic materials has been rationalized by the increased demand from growing populations and the development of high-throughput production systems. Plastic materials at low costs with reliable properties have been utilized in many everyday products. Multibillion-dollar companies are established around these plastic materials, and each polymer takes years to optimize, secure intellectual property, comply with the regulatory bodies such as the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals and the Environmental Protection Agency and develop consumer confidence. Therefore, developing a fully sustainable new plastic material with even a slightly different chemical structure is a costly and long process. Hence, the production of the common plastic materials with exactly the same chemical structures that does not require any new registration processes better reflects the reality of how to address the critical future of sustainable plastics. In this review, we have highlighted the very recent examples on the synthesis of common monomers using chemicals from sustainable feedstocks that can be used as a like-for-like substitute to prepare conventional petrochemical-free thermoplastics.

Photo-induced Cu-RDRP of acrylates in a continuous flow reactor without the need for deoxygenation or externally added reagents. Optimization of the catalyst concentration and the flow rate/residence time leads to well-defined polyacrylates with controlled molecular weights, excellent initiator efficiency, high end-group fidelity polymers and product uniformity. A multifunctional initiator was also used to demonstrate the versatility of the system. † Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See