High-value utilization of forest resources: Dehydroabietic acid as a chemical platform for producing non-toxic and environment-friendly polymer materials

It remains a great challenge to produce high value-added biomass based chemicals and polymer materials using forest resources. We report the first example of the non-toxic and environmentally friendly polymer materials from dehydroabietic acid (one of the most important derivatives of forest resources) to replace traditional polyvinyl chloride (PVC) materials containing toxic phthalate ester plasticizers. In this study, dehydroabietic acid propargyl ester (DPE) was prepared and grafted onto chains of azide functionalized PVC to obtain DPE-PVC graft copolymers (DPC). DPC exhibited improved flexibility than PVC without plasticizer migration in five different solvents. DMA and DSC demonstrated that DPE, as the branched chains of DPC, played effective plasticizing effect on DPC as internal plasticizer. Moreover, thermal degradation of DPC released less poisonous gases (HCl and Cl2) and produced more char residue than PVC. These environmentally friendly performances of flexible polymer materials without toxic phthalate esters could make DPC use in various fields such as packaging, toys materials and functional materials with higher requirements for solvent resistant extraction and releasing toxic gases during burning process. The study provides momentum for clean utilization of forest resources and producing environmental protection polymer materials based on dehydroabietic acid with improved performance.