Self-destructing glue solves a sticky environmental problem

GLUE THAT deliberately comes unstuck sounds like a joke. But it is useful to be able to take things to pieces for recycling once their lives are over, so adhesive that becomes unadhesive on command could be valuable. James Broughton, a chemist at Oxford Brookes University, in Britain, thinks he has just the things. The inventions he and his colleagues have come up with are not new glues, , but rather “disbonding” agents that can be put into existing glues to break their grip when it is no longer needed.In the past, when the components of machines like cars and aircraft were made mainly of metal, welding and soldering were the principal ways of joining them together. But the spread of plastics—and particularly of composites like glass fibre and carbon fibre—means that glued joints are much more common than they used to be. Effective recycling requires materials to be sorted and processed separately. Taking an object to pieces is the first stage of doing that. Recycling things that have been glued thus involves disbonding the glue.