Rethinking Polyurethane Dogma for Fully Renewable and Biodegradable Foams

The development and adoption of sustainable alternatives to the major classes of plastics is an urgent global need. Accounting for 10% of new plastics, polyurethanes (PUs) can be renewably sourced, and a scalable route to 100% renewable PUs incorporating aliphatic diisocyanates that can be derived from plant or algae oil has been demonstrated. Historically, most PUs have been formulated with aromatic diisocyanates, which currently have no biological source, and traditional dogma assigns PU hard segments to these aromatic components. We recently showed that the renewable aromatic monomer furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA) can be incorporated into polyols as a way to replace these hard segments when utilizing aliphatic diisocyanates. Here, we report a systematic study to understand the molecular role of both aromatic and aliphatic components in high performance PU foam formulations using FDCA polyols. We show that these foams display robust mechanical properties rivaling commercial materials and show excellent biodegradability. This work suggests that many commercial materials could be reengineered for both renewability and biodegradability to address the sustainability gap.