New Research Publication: Designing Biodegradability Into Acrylic Polymers — One Molecule at a Time
- bonusjidapa
- May 19
- 3 min read
The sticker on your water bottle. The label on a prescription bottle. The tape holding together your last Amazon package. Odds are, every single one of those adhesives was made from the same basic class of chemistry — acrylic polymers derived from fossil fuels — and odds are, every one of them will still be sitting in a landfill, or broken down into microplastics in a waterway, decades from now.
That's not a niche problem. The global adhesives, coatings, and sealants market exceeds $500 billion, and it is almost entirely built on petroleum-derived monomers. Over 90% of material used in dispersed applications is never recovered. The industry has known this for years. What it has lacked is a practical, drop-in solution.
A new paper published in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research — co-authored by Kaufert Technologies founder Professor Steven J. Severtson — takes a significant step toward solving that problem, and the approach is more elegant than you might expect.
The Core Idea: Control the Microstructure, Control the Outcome
The research centers on a class of molecules called renewable macromonomers (MMs) — biodegradable polyester chains, built from lactide (a corn-derived monomer) and ε-caprolactone, that are capped with a vinyl group so they can copolymerize directly into conventional acrylic polymer systems.
That last part is what makes this different from previous bio-based alternatives. There is no new equipment required. No process changes. No reformulation from scratch. The macromonomer simply joins the existing polymerization reaction alongside the standard acrylic monomers, becoming chemically bonded into the polymer backbone as a side chain.
What the new paper advances is the understanding of microstructure — specifically, how the arrangement of lactide (L) and caprolactone (C) units within those side chains determines the final polymer's mechanical behavior, adhesive performance, and rate of biodegradation.
This turns out to matter enormously.
Why Microstructure Is the Key Lever
Think of a macromonomer side chain like a string of beads — some beads are lactide (rigid, crystallizable, biodegradable), some are caprolactone (flexible, amorphous). The ratio and sequence of those beads along the chain determines whether the side chain is stiff or flexible, whether it phase-separates from the acrylic backbone, and how quickly it breaks down in a composting environment.
The Kaufert Technologies platform provides four independent design axes for tuning this:
Head group — the chemistry connecting the side chain to the backbone
Comonomer identity — what monomers are used alongside lactide
Lactide-to-comonomer ratio — controls the balance between rigidity and flexibility
Microstructure (R value) — the statistical distribution of units along the chain, confirmed by ¹³C NMR measurements spanning R = 0.50 to 0.82
This design space covers thousands of distinct structures — all from a single scalable platform.
Performance Doesn't Take a Back Seat
A common assumption in sustainable materials is that you're always trading something — usually performance — to get the environmental benefit. The data in this body of work challenges that assumption directly.
Across waterborne and hot melt acrylic systems, renewable content up to 50 wt% has been demonstrated at full commercial pressure-sensitive adhesive (PSA) performance parity. Biodegradation, validated using the ASTM D5338 composting protocol, scales directly and proportionally with MM content — meaning the designer can dial in the exact end-of-life behavior needed for a given application, whether that's a compostable label or a longer-lived industrial coating.
Validated applications to date include:
Water-based pressure-sensitive adhesives
Wood glues and coatings
Latex paints and spray coatings
Hot melt pressure-sensitive adhesives
Medical adhesives
Read the full paper: Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.5c05340
Contact us: sever018@umn.edu | 763-274-8458
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