Iron-catalysed synthesis and chemical recycling of telechelic 1,3-enchained oligocyclobutanes.

Closed-loop recycling offers the opportunity to mitigate plastic waste through reversible polymer construction and deconstruction. Although examples of chemical recycling of polymers are known, few have been applied to materials derived from abundant commodity olefinic monomers, which are the building blocks of ubiquitous plastic resins. Here we describe a [2+2] cycloaddition/oligomerization of 1,3-butadiene to yield a previously unrealized telechelic microstructure of (1,n'-divinyl)oligocyclobutane.

Single crystal to single crystal topochemical photoreactions: measuring the degree of disorder in the [2+2] photodimerization of trans-cinnamic acid using single-crystal 13C NMR spectroscopy.

A single crystal of α-trans-cinnamic acid was synthesized with a (13)C-label at the β-carbon position and photoreacted to yield the [2+2] cycloaddition product, α-truxillic acid. (13)C{(1)H} cross-polarization (CP) single-crystal NMR experiments were performed on the unreacted and sequentially photoreacted samples for different goniometer orientations, and the spectra were simulated using the SIMMOL and SIMPSON software packages. Atomic coordinates from single-crystal X-ray diffraction data were used as inputs in the simulations, which allowed the chemical shift tensor to be precisely measured and related to the unit cell (or molecular) reference frame of cinnamic acid.