Be my colleague! Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is hiring two tenure-track positions for Fall 2026, chemical education and coatings technology.
Chen Ed: jobs.calpoly.edu/en-us/job/55...
Coatings: jobs.calpoly.edu/en-us/job/55...
Such cool work!! Did the Stache lab just solve the plastic crisis?? 😅 can’t wait to see what’s next!
To do this & do it without any apparent input from longtime members (& to serve up an obnoxiously cutesy 404 page on top of it all) is very bad
Very excited to share our recent article in JACS where we showed that we could capture mechanoradicals formed during polymer degradation and use them to grow polymers back to high MWs or prime them for depolymerization! pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Megan R. Hill
Every academic right now
Megan R. Hill
It may not be cool or hip in some circles, but we legitimately do need a massive amount of people to run for office.
Flood the school boards, councils, county seats, state legislatures, Congress, etc.
Big changes at the top happen when the ground shifts at the bottom. And that can start now.
On really sad lab days in grad school, I'd tell my labmates they were going to make a mistake, make a serendipitous discovery, and get a Science paper out of it.
For one chemist, that happened! An accidental discovery of a new way to recycle Plexiglas! 😍
via @bribarbu.bsky.social:
🧪⚗️ #chemsky
Plastics pervade every aspect of modern life, yet effective mechanical recycling remains a major challenge. This is, in part, because of the mechanical forces that are involved in reprocessing, which break polymer chains and generate mechanoradicals, leading to a reduction in molecular weight and diminished material properties. This work introduces a robust strategy to capture and redirect these reactive intermediates, enabling value-preserving recycling pathways for widely used polymers polystyrene (PS) and poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA). By employing ball milling to induce chain scission, we demonstrate that mechanoradicals can be trapped by bis(butyl trithiocarbonate), yielding polymers with trithiocarbonate (TTC) end groups. Polymers degraded via ball milling showed significant reduction in molecular weight, ≈90% lower than the pristine polymers. These low molecular weight, TTC-functionalized polymers then served as macroinitiators for light-mediated controlled polymerization or, in the case of PMMA, as mediators for depolymerization under mild conditions. Chain extension of the degraded materials led to restored or increased molecular weight compared to the pristine polymers. Shear oscillatory rheology experiments revealed a recovery of entangled polymer properties, as evidenced by the reappearance of the rubbery plateau. We further showed that this “capture-and-repair” strategy is compatible with multiple cycles of degradation and chain extension, achieving repeated molecular weight recovery over three cycles. Additionally, we found that ball milling alone lowers the thermal depolymerization temperature of PMMA, enabling up to ≈44% depolymerization at 220 °C. Together, these findings highlight mechanoradical capture as a promising strategy to both enhance circularity and improve overall performance of mechanically recycled plastics.
