Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) have attracted increasing interest as sustainable plastics because of their biorenewability and biodegradability in the ambient environment. However, current semicrystalline PHAs face three long-standing challenges to broad commercial implementation and application: lack of melt processability, mechanical brittleness, and unrealized recyclability, the last of which is essential for achieving a circular plastics economy. Here we report a synthetic PHA platform that addresses the origin of thermal instability by eliminating α-hydrogens in the PHA repeat units and thus precluding facile cis-elimination during thermal degradation. This simple α,α-disubstitution in PHAs enhances the thermal stability so substantially that the PHAs become melt-processable. Synergistically, this structural modification also endows the PHAs with the mechanical toughness, intrinsic crystallinity, and closed-loop chemical recyclability.

Isotactic propylene–butene copolymers [i(P-co-B)] with precise and controlled molecular structures were synthesized with various organometallic catalysts having different stereoselectivities. Stereoregular and stereodefective samples of i(P-co-B) with 1-butene (B) content variable in the whole range of composition were synthesized. All samples crystallize regardless of composition, indicating cocrystallization of propene and 1-butene units, which are incorporated in the unit cells of polymorphic forms of isotactic poly(propylene) (iPP) and isotactic poly(1-butene) (iPB). The copolymers show a continuum change of crystal morphology with the composition, transforming from big spherulites to bundle-like and needle-like crystals, to granular crystals. The cocrystallization allows maintaining high crystallinity of copolymers for any composition and provides an opportunity to develop outstanding mechanical properties that can be tailored by changing the isotacticity and composition. This allows, ideally, combining in the same material the different properties of stiffness of iPP and flexibility of iPB. These copolymers show, indeed, mechanical properties intermediate between iPP and iPB, ranging from stiffness/brittleness and ductility/flexibility depending on the composition and isotacticity, with high strength and Young’s modulus that may be regulated by the stereoregularity of the iPP and iPB sequences, which is, in turn, dictated by the catalyst structure.