Plastics like polyethylene are engulfing the planet. It’s not just our landfills that are loaded with them. Our oceans are choking in it; it’s made its way inside some of the creatures living in places that sunlight doesn’t even reach. It’s an environmental menace. But researchers may have found a way to make materials as strong as fossil fuel plastics using something not only more environmentally friendly but also easily accessible to pretty much anyone who has recently fried some chicken.
Publishing their findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a research team led by University of South Carolina polymer scientist Nargarjuna Mahadas figured out how to transform leftover cooking oil into polyesters that behave a lot like polyethylene.
That sounds great, but it doesn’t mean much if the resulting material has no practical use. Luckily, in some cases, the materials outperform conventional plastics. One formulation, in particular, even turned out to be so unusually, powerfully strong that it could rival commercially available glues.
It turns out that cooking oil has some chemical properties that make it perfect for conversion into a strong adhesive. Used oil is packed with triglycerides, which may be terrible for your heart, but its long hydrocarbon chains give it the very same strength, durability, flexibility, and moisture resistance that make plastics like polyethylene so useful.
Mahadas and his team broke down the oil’s fatty acids and glycerol into smaller building blocks called monomers. These were then reassembled into polyesters using ester bonds, which have the added benefit of being biodegradable and recyclable.
By tweaking the polymer structure to make chains more linear or more branched as needed, the researchers could fine-tune the material’s properties. Somewhere along the way, they noticed that some versions were sticky. One, in particular, stood out.
When tested against commercial EVA and epoxy adhesives, the cooking oil glue matched or exceeded their strength. It bonded stainless steel, copper, wood, and cardboard, and in one test, glued steel plates together strongly enough to tow a sedan uphill. It could even be formed into a glue stick and used in a standard hot glue gun. The future of glue could be in an oil that was previously used to make deep-fried Oreos.
The performance is great, and the environmental upside is impossible to ignore. Humans generate billions of gallons of wasted cooking oil a year. We should probably be using chemical agents like a FryAway to solidify it and dump it in the trash, or loading up our Dutch ovens with flour to soak it all up so it can be properly disposed of. Unfortunately, a lot of people dump it down the sink.
We’re probably not going to be running out of it anytime soon, and we’re probably going to keep deep frying stuff because the human race has collectively decided that matter how health-conscious we get as a species, we would eat a tire if it were deep-fried. By turning this non-edible waste into a high-performance adhesive, we could be heading toward a future where plastics don’t come from the dead dinosaurs beneath her feet, but from the greasy vats in our local burger joints.
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