SUPERVISOR: Antje POTTHAST

PROJECT ASSIGNED TO: Jonas SIMON 

You are probably reading these lines on your phone or computer (a big portion of it consists of plastic), wearing a shirt  (probably containing synthetic fibers), and sitting on a chair, which surely is a mix of different synthetic polymers. I could go on and on, but the short story is, plastics are ubiquitous in daily life. But why is that? Commonly plastics are tough, lightweight, flexible, stable, and diverse—all for an extremely affordable price. Plastics are awesome! Aren’t they? The challenges—dwindling fossil fuels, microplastics, pollution, climate change—are disparate. One promising approach to tackle those multiple challenges is to utilize cellulose; the most abundant organic polymer on planet earth.

Within the next years, I will modify paper pulp (which consists mainly of cellulose and hemicellulose) with the aim to design cellulose-based materials showing thermoplastic behavior (= moldable). Herein, we will closely investigate modification reactions of cellulose to better understand the underlying processes and establish new methods to avoid harmful by-products.