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Less than 10% of the plastics generated globally are recycled, while the rest are incinerated, accumulated in landfills, or leach into the environment. New technologies are emerging to chemically recycle waste plastics that are receiving tremendous interest from academia and industry. Chemists and chemical engineers need to understand the fundamentals of these technologies to design improved systems for chemical recycling and upcycling of waste plastics. In this paper, we review the entire life cycle of plastics and options for the management of plastic waste to address barriers to industrial chemical recycling and further provide perceptions on possible opportunities with such materials. Knowledge and insights to enhance plastic recycling beyond its current scale are provided. Outstanding research problems and where researchers in the field should focus their efforts in the future are also discussed.

Structural adhesives are commonly used to join dissimilar materials and are of particular interest in complex technological devices used in automotive, telecommunications, photonic devices, aerospace and sustainable power production and storage. Their strength, ease of application and stability are of significant help in the manufacture and service of the device, however, they can present significant issues at end of life, particularly when technology critical metals need to be recovered. In this paper, we highlight some of the issues, and discuss an alternative approach: the use of adhesives that can be debonded upon application of an external stimulus. The aim of this critical review is to consider the polymer systems which have been investigated and suggest some alternative strategies. It also aims to demonstrate the different stimuli that can be used to debond and critique the applicability of these with a number of case studies. Finally, the service conditions and process economics are considered together with a discussion of the Green benefits of this type of methodology.

A multiscale approach to sustainability was selected to analyse lignocellulose uses and availability with a focus on biomass growth, paper, insulation, construction wood, information and communication technologies, and biobased textiles.

The concepts of Safe by Design (SbD) and Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) are receiving increasing attention. The definitions of both concepts include the term ‘life cycle’ in combination with the terms ‘chemical’, ‘material’ and ‘product’, but their meanings are not further elaborated and defined in scholarly publications on SbD/SSbD. Here, we address two research questions: (1) How are the terms chemical, material and product used and defined in the scholarly literature on SbD and SSbD; (2) How are life cycles defined and which are considered in the scholarly literature on SbD/SSbD? We found largely consistent, though still confusing, uses of the terms product, material and chemical and we found four types of life cycles in the reviewed papers. Using consistent definitions of the terms product, material and chemical, we reduce the four types of life cycles found to three types of distinctive life cycles: (1) the life cycle of a product; (2) the life cycle of a chemical in a specific product; (3) the life cycle of a chemical in all its product applications. We discuss the different trade-offs that each of these life cycle approaches canidentify and argue that they are complementary and should preferably all be applied in SbD/SSbD studies.