The last five years have seen an explosion of research interest in biobased polymers, which exhibit recyclability, shape memory, self-healing, and stimuli responsiveness in ways that no other type of plastic does.
Biobased vitrimers can be made from a variety of renewable feedstocks, making them a strong candidate for petroleum plastic replacement in industries as wide ranging as biomedics and automotive manufacturing.
The EU is researching how to incorporate the material into wind turbines for less wasteful energy generation while US researchers have used it to develop a new type of recyclable circuitboard.
What makes biobased vitrimers so special and how could they become commercialised?
The best of both
Biobased vitrimers are a relatively new class of materials pioneered by French researchers in the early 2010s. Their work created a new field in polymer science that has gained mounting attention from chemists since 2020.
The number of publications dealing with biobased vitrimers has shot up since 2020. From https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2025/cc/d4cc05967k
What makes biobased vitrimers so special? The answer is that they solve a major problem in materials science and industry – how to make a material strong but also capable of being recycled several times.
Biobased vitrimers are able to do this by bringing together the best feature of two polymer groups with very different characteristics: thermoset versus thermoplastics. Thermosetting polymers are known for their high mechanical strength, heat resistance, and dimensional stability. These properties trace back to what is called its crosslinked molecular structure. Their properties mean they are found everywhere in the aircraft industry, tissue engineering, electronic devices, and automobile manufacturing.
Thermoplastics, by contrast, have a non-crosslinked structure. This is what makes this class of polymers so easy to recycle without compromising their structural properties. Yet they also have their downsides: they are mechanically weaker than thermosetting plastics at high temperatures.
Now, scientists say that vitrimers present us with a new type of thermoset which also has the recyclability of thermoplastics strengths. They can be made to have shape memory, to self-heal, to be welded or be reprocessed, all without compromising their structural properties.
At normal temperatures, biobased vitrimers behave like the strong, heat-resistant thermosetting plastics. At higher temperatures they start to flow and become processable, just like thermoplastics.
In fact, vitrimers behave somewhat like glass under high temperatures: once melted into a liquid state, their molecular networks do not lose integrity, meaning they can be cooled to form shapes over and over again, each time like they are a virgin material.
The unusual combination of strength and recyclability in the biobased vitrimers owes to its dynamic covalent bonds. These are very different from the crosslinked structure of the thermosetting polymers since dynamic covalent bonds are reversible chemical bonds: they allow the fundamental molecular matrix of the polymer to be re-arranged.
This ability for its molecular structures to rearrange is not just a boon for recycling. This type of structural feature can allow the material to alter slightly in response to temperature and pressure changes. This means biobased vitrimers can behave differently in different environmental circumstances, without the need for drastic alterations in the polymer’s overall chemical composition.
Sustainability
One of the reasons why scientists and researchers are excited about biobased vitrimers is because the material meets many green chemistry principles, a set of rules that help researchers and producers assess how sustainable a material is.
Their ability to unite high strength with recyclability can allow industry to cut back on toxic waste entering the environment and support circular economy principles of re-use. Depending on the formulation, biobased vitrimers can even be biodegradable or compostable. The renewable feedstock can also reduce the chemical industry’s dependence on fossil fuels and lower its carbon footprint.
Feedstocks for biobased vitrimers
Scientists have identified different feedstocks and manufacturing routes to produce biobased vitrimers and are still experimenting with different ingredients and processing methods for different applications.
One of the most studied biobased vitrimer feedstocks has been epoxidized soybean oil, found to be an ideal candidate.
Researchers have also used natural peach gum to make epoxy vitrimers, mixing it with itaconic acid. Peach gum is a kind of natural plant gum, secreted from the fruit and trunk of peach tree, opening a way for peach-growing regions to valorise an agricultural waste-stream.
The resulting chemical has the potential to replace petroleum-derived epoxy resins applied in anti-corrosive coatings, adhesives, electronics, transportation, construction, aerospace and high-performance composites. The peach gum-based formula was notable for overcoming a problem in using biobased vitrimers in transport, construction and aerospace: its low tensile strength. The peach gum based biobased epoxy vitrimer in fact had a strength comparable to commercial epoxy resin made from petroleum.
The next green adhesive?
The research into applications for biobased vitrimers ave focused on sustainable adhesives, self-healing coatings, and easily recyclable packaging.
Many high level adhesives currently in use throughout industry consist of epoxy thermosets – a type of thermoset plastic that is usually made from petroleum. The substance makes up around 70% of the global market for thermoset polymers and is found in furniture, floors, windows, and shoes.
Today, it is almost impossible to economically recover and recycle the adhesives inside products at the end of their lives because it is permanently bonded onto the surfaces of its application. With millions of tonnes of this adhesive each year crushed and burned, these non-recyclable epoxy thermosets pose a major environmental hazard. Greener adhesive materials are needed that have the functionality of petroleum epoxy resin but are capable of being recovered and recycled.
One research paper has reported a biobased virtimer adhesive that can be made using the biobased compound vanillin and an epoxy resin made from linseed oil. The material was shown to be recyclable.
Another study led by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported a biobased vitrimer with adhesive properties made from castor oil and vanillin. The material performed with ‘excellent mechanical properties, thermal stability, solvent resistance, outstanding cycle processability, re-weldability and good shape memory behavior.’ In addition, it showed rapid degradability under mild conditions and ‘high performance antibacterial activity’.
Apart from combining strength and recyclability, a notable feature of biobased vitrimers are its so-called self-healing properties. This has been demonstrated in many studies, including one by another Chinese team that made a fully biobased, high-performing vitrimer adhesives using castor oil, cysteamine, and vanillin. The adhesion was exceptional but it also showed self-healing features.
Vitrimer composites in clean energy
The EU-funded R&D project EOLIAN is one of the early research projects that is trying to bring biobased virtimers into real world applications. It seeks to develop >60% bio-based vitrimer that can be used in onshore and offshore wind turbine blades.
Incorporating vitrimers into wind turbine design is meant to tackle the lack of recyclability right now in the industry. The aim is to make wind turbines circular, minimising its end-of-life waste, something that will become vital in reducing the environmental impacts of renewable power as capacity scales.
A vitrimer composite wind blade can be heated and turned into a new component for the wind turbine, or else can be separated out from other materials in order to manufacture parts for different applications altogether.
In wind turbines, the self-healing properties of biobased vitrimers come into their own. This makes it much easier to repair minor blade damage than ordinary, non-responsive materials. When the material gets heated, the molecular bonds in vitrimers break and rearrange themselves to ‘heal’ or fill-in scratches and microcracks.
New sustainable vitrimer composites – repairable, reprocessable, and easily recyclable – will provide a step change in how wind turbine blades are maintained, reused and recycled in a circular economy. This means that it is easier to repair small fractures from afar simply by building a heating system into the blade itself – something that can have other benefits too, like ice removal.
The project has its focus on using vanillin and epoxidised vegetable oils as their sustainable feedstocks.
Circuitboards
Moving from the large-scale of the wind turbine to the small scale of the digital world, the biobased vitrimer has even more surprising applications as a new type of circuitboard material.
Scientists from the University of Washington have found a way to replace the resin in circuitboard fiberglass with vitrimers. The resin material in circuitboards function as the flat surface on which chips, resistors, and transformers are printed. They are currently difficult to recycle because its constituent ingredients are difficult to separate out in a way that can be economically viable.
A “vPCB” (vitrimer printed circuit board) on the other hand can be recycled by being immersed in an organic solvent with a relatively low boiling point. Once the vitrimer is treated in this way it swells and forms a jelly-like material that can be re-used. This recycling method also leaves the circuitboard’s electronic components undamaged.
The biobased vitrimer circuit board is one of the earliest attempts to show the real commercial applications of this new polymer class. The research emphasised that these new biobased circuit boards could be made at existing electronics plants and can be recycled multiple times, reducing the carbon footprint and carcinogenic emissions of circuitboard manufacturing.
Towards commercialisation
Biobased vitrimers are such a new type of material that more research needs to be done on ways that its strength and re-processability can be maximised, as well as on how to best enhance particular properties or particular applications.
R&D is not the only thing that will get these materials to market. To commercialise, biobased chemicals either need to have staunch regulatory backing or far out-perform legacy materials across diverse applications to justify the costs of producing them.
Biobased vitrimer’s self-healing capability is one unique selling point of the material.
For certain vitrimers, however, we still need more research into maximising their mechanical strength relative to petroleum alternatives.
Another way to find a bigger market share is to fully lean into the operating cost-lowering aspects of green chemistry. One advantage of green chemicals is that biobased compounds in general do not require the very high temperatures needed to make ordinary synthetic chemicals. Finding biobased solvents and catalysts that can make the vitrimer manufacturing process more cost-effective (and, in general, less toxic) than petroleum polymers will be crucial in achieving a market edge.
