Making plastic durable and degradable

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Polyethylene is the most abundantly manufactured plastic in the world. Due to properties like durability, it has many diverse, and even long-term uses. Professor Stefan Mecking's team in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Konstanz has now incorporated polar groups in the material's molecular chains in order to expand its properties and simultaneously reduce the problematical persistence of plastic in the environment. The desired favorable properties of polyethylene remain unchanged afterwards. Results of this laboratory study have been published in Science on 29 October 2021.

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