Hybrid monomer design for circular polymers that unify conflicting properties

To address a critical challenge in designing circular polymers with not only complete chemical recyclability but also performance properties rivaling present unsustainable competitors requires innovative strategies to overcome common polymerizability/depolymerizability and recyclability/performance tradeoffs so that conflicting properties could be unified. Here we introduce a hybrid monomer design strategy to synergistically couple property-contrasting parent monomer structures to hybridized offspring monomers that not only radically alter properties of the resulting polymers, relative to their parent polymers or copolymers, but also unify the above-mentioned conflicting properties. Several hybrid monomer systems successfully developed to-date argued that hybrid monomer design is a powerful approach to develop robust circular polymers without yielding to common property tradeoffs.