Plastic pollution is one of the greatest challenges for the modern world,
due largely to the fact that most plastics are produced without permanent recyclability in mind. The plastic water bottles, chip bags, toys and packaging that indiscriminately clutter landscapes and landfills are too chemically complex to be broken down to their original components and recycled repeatedly.
“In one of my classes, I made the analogy that it’s like making pancakes,”
said Scott Phillips, a professor in the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering. “You blend all this stuff together and then you get a certain texture and flavor for a pancake. Now you ask the question, ‘How do you take your pancake and recycle back all the components you put into it, and get them pure from one another and separated?’ It’s hard.”
Phillips’ educational background is in chemistry, but his motivation is to solve big problems around plastics.
After 15 years of research, he’s created something that could revolutionize plastics: a new polymer.
Polymers are large molecules made up of long chains of smaller molecules called monomers. Hair and DNA are examples of natural polymers. Plastics are polymers, where specific molecular structures and compounds control the resulting plastic properties to be stretchy, like a trash bag, or rigid, like a toy truck, and so on.
“Modern plastic recycling processes often use heat and mechanical force
to recycle an item, which ends up breaking some of the polymers, and as
polymers get shorter, the mechanical properties — the strength, flexibility and recyclability and so forth — of the resulting plastic that you want to make gets diminished,” Phillips said.
What’s special about Phillips’ polymer — a stable polyacetal, or engineered thermoplastic — is that with the right processing, it can depolymerize and convert all the way back to its starting material. Not only that, but it remains solid and unreactive at room temperature in open air, which is a major advancement for materials historically prone to degradation.
In short, Phillips’ polymer offers a pathway for closed-loop recycling.
“I started my own group in 2008 and decided, ‘Hey, maybe I’ll make
polymers.’ I had never made a polymer in my life,” Phillips said with a laugh. “People told me I was wasting my time, and that nobody was ever going to change from polyethylenes [very common plastics] and that there was no need for this.”
From idea to innovation
Nishad Dhopatkar, a senior research associate in the Advanced Materials
Solutions group at Avery Dennison, happened upon Phillips’ research at a conference in 2019 and was instantly intrigued by its potential.
Avery Dennison is a multinational global company — headquartered in
Ohio — that works in areas to develop new materials and reduce waste in
areas such as labels and packaging materials, eco-friendly graphics,
performance tapes and digital ink solutions.
Dhopatkar said, “At Avery Dennison, sustainability is our core value. With our continuous interest in exploring and developing new materials that help us deliver on our sustainability goals, we started collaborating with Scott’s research group at Boise State University.”
Together, Phillips and Dhopatkar developed prototypes of labels and
tapes, as well as structural adhesives, all with the goal of enabling end-of-life disassembly and recycling.
In 2025, based on the promising experiments, Avery Dennison licensed
the technology from Boise State to explore further possibilities. This
commercialization opportunity received significant support from
Boise State’s Office of Tech Transfer, led by Director Brett Adkins. Tech
commercialization is a complex process, and the Office of Tech Transfer
helped Phillips with the invention disclosure process, negotiations,
vetting the technology for novelty issues, coordinating patent drafting
and filings.
“When the community, faculty and staff see intellectual property go from
the lab to the marketplace, we’re demonstrating the real-world value
of our research and inspiring faculty, staff and students to continue to
pursue bold ideas and create unique solutions,” Adkins said. “I hope this
license is the first of many, and shows how our research can drive impact, inspire our faculty and students and strengthen the university’s role as an engine of economic growth.”
For Phillips, commercializing this polymer is not only a huge step
for his research, but for the field of plastics recycling — a field in which
his polymers offer both good material properties and easy recycling.
“The polymers that people are using have been in development since the
1930s and are so highly engineered that I thought, ‘Whatever I come
up with now is not going to be competitive.’ It’s really exciting to be
wrong in this assessment and to have a polymer that can be implemented so quickly to help reduce plastic waste.” Phillips said.