Dec 1, 2025 07:40 PM
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1107650
INTRO: Yuwei Gu was hiking through Bear Mountain State Park in New York when inspiration struck.
Plastic bottles littered the trail and more floated on a nearby lake. The jarring sight in such a pristine environment made the Rutgers chemist stop in his tracks. Nature makes plenty of long-stranded molecules called polymers, including DNA and RNA, yet those natural polymers eventually break down. Synthetic polymers such as plastics don’t. Why?
“Biology uses polymers everywhere, such as proteins, DNA, RNA and cellulose, yet nature never faces the kind of long-term accumulation problems we see with synthetic plastics,” said Gu, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.
As he stood in the woods, the answer came to him. “The difference has to lie in chemistry,” he said.
If nature can build polymers that serve their purpose and then disappear, Gu reasoned, perhaps human-made plastics could be made to do the same. Gu already knew that natural polymers contain tiny helper groups built into their structure that make chemical bonds easier to break when the time is right.
“I thought, what if we copy that structural trick?” he said. “Could we make human-made plastics behave the same way?”
The idea worked. In a study published in Nature Chemistry, Gu and a team of Rutgers scientists have shown that by borrowing this principle from nature, they can create plastics that break down under everyday conditions without heat or harsh chemicals.
“We wanted to tackle one of the biggest challenges of modern plastics,” Gu said. “Our goal was to find a new chemical strategy that would allow plastics to degrade naturally under everyday conditions without the need for special treatments.” (MORE - details)
INTRO: Yuwei Gu was hiking through Bear Mountain State Park in New York when inspiration struck.
Plastic bottles littered the trail and more floated on a nearby lake. The jarring sight in such a pristine environment made the Rutgers chemist stop in his tracks. Nature makes plenty of long-stranded molecules called polymers, including DNA and RNA, yet those natural polymers eventually break down. Synthetic polymers such as plastics don’t. Why?
“Biology uses polymers everywhere, such as proteins, DNA, RNA and cellulose, yet nature never faces the kind of long-term accumulation problems we see with synthetic plastics,” said Gu, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.
As he stood in the woods, the answer came to him. “The difference has to lie in chemistry,” he said.
If nature can build polymers that serve their purpose and then disappear, Gu reasoned, perhaps human-made plastics could be made to do the same. Gu already knew that natural polymers contain tiny helper groups built into their structure that make chemical bonds easier to break when the time is right.
“I thought, what if we copy that structural trick?” he said. “Could we make human-made plastics behave the same way?”
The idea worked. In a study published in Nature Chemistry, Gu and a team of Rutgers scientists have shown that by borrowing this principle from nature, they can create plastics that break down under everyday conditions without heat or harsh chemicals.
“We wanted to tackle one of the biggest challenges of modern plastics,” Gu said. “Our goal was to find a new chemical strategy that would allow plastics to degrade naturally under everyday conditions without the need for special treatments.” (MORE - details)