Green glues: will they stick?

Jonathan Wilker swivels in his chair and sweeps his hand around the room. “There’s the computer, the book bindings, the furniture, shoes, the carpet, all the packaging and boxes, plywood, the walls,” he says. Wilker, a chemist and materials engineer, is sitting in his office in the Herbert C. Brown chemistry building at Purdue University. He is talking about all the things in the room that contain adhesives. In a laboratory down the hall, his group is at work creating the next generation of adhesives and coatings, inspired by sticky substances found in nature. Glues are everywhere, hiding in plain sight, Wilker says. “You don’t really see them, so people don’t think about them that much, [but] adhesives are in almost everything.” Adhesives hold the world together. In 2024, the world consumed over 19 million metric tons of adhesives—equivalent to the weight of water needed to fill 7,600 Olympic-sized swimming