Chemists at Virginia Tech (VT) have made an adhesive tape that has more sticky powers than Scotch tape and duct tape but can be fully recycled after use (Adv. Funct. Mater. 2026, DOI: 10.1002/adfm.77687).
Just like food packaging, adhesive tapes contain multiple layers made of various polymers. The multi-material construction makes them hard to recycle, says Joshua C. Worch, a chemist and sustainable polymer researcher at VT.
Most tapes are composed of a soft, sticky acrylic-based polymer adhesive on a flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) backing. Worch and his colleagues designed a tape with adhesive and backing layers made of the same recyclable polymer.
They use polydisulfide polymers, which contain repeating sulfur-sulfur bonds that can be easily broken and reformed with chemical stimuli. Polydisulfides are made from biologically derived molecules via green chemistry routes. Researchers are exploring the sustainable polymer’s use for drug delivery and other biomedical applications.
Worch’s team makes their polymers from lipoic acid, a compound found in broccoli and spinach that is synthetically produced as a health supplement. “Most techniques to make polymers out of these materials give something really goopy and sticky with not much structure,” he says.
Researchers made this sticky tape using the same recyclable polydisulfide polymer for the adhesive and nonsticky backing layers. Credit:
Woojung Ham
But the VT researchers have developed a technique to make very large, cohesive copolymers from two lipoic acid–based monomers: α-lipoic acid and its ester derivative, ethyl lipoate. The reaction requires a nontoxic organocatalyst, works with nonchlorinated solvents, and runs at room temperature (ChemSusChem 2025, DOI: 10.1002/cssc.202500194). “The extreme size of the polymer chains leads to more entanglements, which gives them a lot of cohesive strength,” Worch says.
The researchers press the copolymer into flexible, sticky films that don’t tear apart. To make the nonstick backing, they treat a copolymer film with sodium hydroxide solution, which neutralizes the acidic species on the polymer and turns it into a stiff ionomer with plastic-like mechanical properties. Finally, they hot-press the adhesive and backing layers together.
By fine-tuning the ratio of the two monomers in an ideal “Goldilocks region,” Worch says, they can make tape that has more adhesive strength than all the commercial tapes they tested, including Scotch tape, masking tape, duct tape, and Uline tape.
Recycling the tape requires treatment with chloroform and sulfuric acid, which breaks the polymer into its building blocks. Disulfide bonds are easily broken by enzymes in the body, so it’s “not unreasonable to expect that microorganisms could break them down” in the environment, he says.
“This is a noteworthy advance in designing monomaterial plastic products, which reduces material complexity and simplifies recycling of end-of-life products,” says Eugene Y.-X. Chen, a polymer chemist at Colorado State University who was not involved in the study. Besides the chemical recyclability, the work is also unique in its clever approach of switching the properties of a single biogenic polydisulfide using simple acid-base chemistry.
Prachi Patel is a senior editor and physical sciences reporter at C&EN based in Pittsburgh.
