Mechanistic insight into the roles of anions and cations in the degradation of poly(ethylene terephthalate) catalyzed by ionic liquids

Abstract

Ionic liquids (ILs) have shown high catalytic activity in the degradation of poly (ethylene terephthalate) (PET), but the effects of anions and cations as well as the mechanism remain ambiguous....

Investigating the degradation of PET utilizing NHC‐based catalysts and effective reuse of the degradation product as an additive with polyurethane adhesive material

“…where W o denotes the initial weight of the PET, whereas W 1 represents the weight of the undegraded PET recovered after the completion of the reaction. 6,20 NMR spectra were carried out using Bruker Avance-III spectrometer at 400 MHz. Multiplicities of the peaks were quoted as the following terms such as singlet (s), doublet (d), triplet (t), and multiplet (m).…”

“…The percentage of degradation of PET was calculated using the following equation. where W o denotes the initial weight of the PET, whereas W 1 represents the weight of the undegraded PET recovered after the completion of the reaction 6,20 …”

Sustainable Design of Structural and Functional Polymers for a Circular Economy

“…[36,105] The use of catalysts [106][107][108] and/or special solvents such as ionic liquids can increase reaction rates at lower temperatures. [109,110] While the process of remonomerization has been extensively researched, especially for poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET), [26,103,106,111,112] purification of the obtained monomers is often a challenge and complicates the process for mixed waste streams.…”

Recent advances in chemical recycling of polyethylene terephthalate waste into value added products for sustainable coating solutions – hopevs. hype

“…In another very recent study, Yeo and co-workers investigated the mechanistic role of cations and anions for catalytic glycolysis of PET using ionic liquids. 67 Where they find that cations primarily attack at the carbonyl oxygen of PET to catalyze the reaction, while the anions form strong H-bonds with PET and ethylene glycol. They used four different type of ionic liquid catalyst N 1111 Ala, N 1111 Cl, ChCl, MmimCl, BmimCl for catalyzed glycolysis of BHET, where the cation part of the ionic liquid coordinate with carbonyl oxygen of the ester, and the hydroxyl oxygen of ethylene glycol attacks the ester group carbon of PET, with proton transfer to the carbonyl oxygen.…”