Citation

Xiao Li, Baohu Wu, Lei Hou*, and Peiyi Wu*. Water-mediated phase separation evolution toward mechanically robust yet room-temperature reprocessable polymer materials. Matter 2025, ASAP.

Summary

Fabricating plastics with reprocessability is of great importance to reduce sustainability concerns. However, simultaneously achieving convenient reprocessing and mechanical robustness remains challenging. Here, an effective strategy of water-mediated phase separation evolution is introduced to break such a limitation, which decouples the mechanical performance and reprocessability of plastic from different hydration states. Specifically, the robust plastic would transform into a dough-like viscoelastic state after full hydration, which is highly reversible. The dough could be facilely processed into arbitrary shapes with diverse means, thus endowing the plastic with low-energy-consuming reprocessing ability. It is revealed that such a hydroplastic behavior is rooted in water-induced “sea island” to bicontinuous phase separation transformation. Particularly, the robust plastic exhibits a tensile strength up to 211.2 MPa and Young’s modulus up to 5.6 GPa. This work provides a promising strategy for the development of high-performance sustainable plastics with easy reprocessing and recycling for practical applications.