Degradable polyurethanes with amino-acid phosphorodiamidates as breakage points

Abstract The global polyurethane (PU) market in 2024 reached a volume of more than 80 billion dollars, or more than 25 million tons. PU are used in numerous applications and contributes to the global plastic waste crisis. For this reason, the customised degradability of polyurethanes, which has been little addressed to date, will become increasingly important. This paper describes our approach of introducing chemical breakage points based on amino-acid based phosphordiamidates (APdA) in the PUs' backbones. We demonstrate that with an increasing amount of APdA the PU disintegrates faster, already at neutral pH 7 and even more pronounced at acidic pH 3. In parallel, we observed that an increasing number of APdA based breakage points leads to decreasing parameters like tensile strength, which was also dependent on their environmental pH. Graphical abstract