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Biobased and biodegradable polymers for a sustainable future: prosperity partnership full team meeting

Posted on 6 March 2024

Further to the award in 2023 of a £2.5M Prosperity Partnership Grant from EPSRC (total value £5M), efforts have been underway at the partners involved (Croda, a global leader in high performance ingredients and technologies, based in Yorkshire, the University of Nottingham, and the University of York) to develop the next generation of polymer liquid formulations.

The full prosperity partnership team meeting at Croda's Ditton site.

Used in a number of day-to-day items including crop protection and personal care products, these special polymers for liquids provide the key function of emulsification and stabilisation, without which, widely used items would be unable to meet consumer requirements. Despite their critical part in formulations, to date there has been no coordinated effort to develop more sustainable versions, and it is estimated that more than 36 million tonnes (enough to fill Wembley Stadium 32 times over) of these polymers are not recovered after use, entering the environment as plastic waste.

With all PhDs for the project now fully recruited, the full team met for the first time at Croda's Ditton site on 22 January. Updates were received from all work packages, and team members were able to see first hand how some of the first polymers being formed on this project are performing, with live real time demonstrations of performance.