These sorts of environmental impact blurbs are hilarious. What kind of scenario are they envisioning where someone wants to remove and reuse a specialized adhesive bonding PTFE parts to something, but don't have ethanol on hand and have to fall back to using hand sanitizer?
It does not indicate that it can bond other very low or low polarity polymers, the most common being polypropylene and polyethylene, which there is no known adhesive that will bond strongly to those two polymers, arguably these 2 are much more common than flourocarbons.
The cyanoacrylate "claimed" solutions for polypropylene and polyethylene are very weak.
They should show results from oxidation, thermal stability, accelerated aging tests.
And I’m beyond skeptical anyone would carefully recover this gunk each even once for re-use outside some contrived lab demo.
Yes, let's do that, this time.
Sounds like a super-cool and useful molecule, but externalities can be killer.
s/^/This /> To test its adhesive strength, researchers first glued two untreated polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) plates by sandwiching molten CyclicFP-fmoc between them and letting it cool at room temperature for 10 min.
Also notable that the glue substance is reusable:
> Remarkably, a simple ethanol wash completely stripped CyclicFP-fmoc from the target PTFE plates, leaving no trace behind. The recovered adhesive proved repeatedly reusable, reliably maintaining its adhesive strength of ~1.2 ± 0.1 MPa across multiple cycles.
Perhaps hot glue guns are going to get an update ;)
But I'd like to take this opportunity to present my semi-annual rant about hot glue (edit: from a hot glue gun), instead.
It's amazing stuff. It's similar to many other liquid adhesives in that you can stick things together with it (probably not PTFE, but...), and they stay pretty well stuck.
But it's got this really neat property that most other things lack: When used with non-porous surfaces, it's removable. A few drops of isopropyl alcohol will eek in between the glue and the surface it is stuck to. It stays solid, but basically just falls right off with no apparent mess.
...which makes it absolutely fantastic for temporary fixturing.
Like: Glue an accelerometer to the middle of the 3D printer bed for resonance tuning using a very thin layer of hot glue, and then just use a bit of isopropyl to take it off later. It's like it never happened.
In the mysterious future, I might have a widget that needs to be disassembled which uses this glue.
And I'm at the shop right now; as I look around the bench, I don't see any industrial products that are primarily ethanol. It's just not something we typically have a use for.
But there is a giant pump-bottle of hand sanitizer that is still right there by the doorway as a holdover from the COVID days. So if this adhesive ever begins to show up in products, and if hand sanitizer is Good Enough, then I'll be using that.
It saves a trip to the hardware store for gallon-sized can of "denatured alcohol" (which is typically very heavy with methanol at an unspecified ratio), and it avoids questions about buying/having a bottle of Everclear from the liquor store.
I think it's worthwhile to mention the possibility of using hand sanitizer for this purpose.
The truth is nowadays you can just choose your favorite brand and they almost certainly have a correct, and good, adhesive selector.
For example, for loctite, you should just use: https://www.henkel-adhesives-selector.com/
I use teflon (sometimes nylon, but mostly teflon) painter pyramids/holders/etc, because i spray finish stuff that is very good at adhering to lots of things, and are acetone based - VOC compliance pretty much forced acetone into solvent based stuff. This in turn pretty much makes finishes melt into anything except PE, nylon, teflon, even if they wouldn't otherwise.
To keep the pyramids and things where i want them, i have magnets glued into them. But because it's PFTE, the magnets don't really stay adhered well, even with (currently) specialized adhesives and i end up regluing them after every few times, often before the project finishes.
What i really want is an adhesive like this one, where i can glue the magnets in, but also remove them after the project finishes, because i'll go soak the pyramids in solvent or something to clean them, but don't want to damage any magnet coatings.
When redoing the wiring for one reason or another, it's trivially easy to peel the switch off with a screwdriver and remove the glue.
There isn't a compellingly better way of attaching that switch there. It has mounting screw holes but they point in the wrong direction, into the cavity. To screw it down, I would need some sort of long risers that somehow attach to the bottom of the cavity and are firm enough to resist the side to side push. Little L-brackets could work that attach to the side of the cavity. It's a very small cavity: hard to screw such brackets in, but that can be solved. Even if the brackets themselves were permanently mounted, not having to be removed when the switch is taken out, it would still take more time than with the glue.
Another use I have for glue is to secure a household internet connection. It's just a thin wire coming out of a RJ jack in the wall, in a room where kids play. The installer didn't crimp the plug into the cable insulation. The situation is that the insulation ends a few millimeters before the RJ plug, leaving a couple of bare wires that seem like 22 AWG crimped in. I "kid-proofed" this with hot glue. Hot glue is all over that plug, and about two feet of the cable is basically encased in hot glue, attached to the switch plate and along the wall right until the point it goes behind some furniture. I check on it from time to time to repair any tearing away.
Superglue doesn't work on Teflon, or most plastics you want it to work on. Wanting to glue plastic things together isn't exactly a niche need. Being able to remove that glue with hand sanitizer would be wonderful.
Now for disassembly, hand sanitizer is usually intentionally thickened to be more of a gel, whereas alcohol will flow into tight spaces. If you're trying to dissolve a glue joint, ethanol or an ethanol water mixture will be orders of magnitude better at penetrating into the joint, and of course you can't dissolve glue you don't reach. So I still think you're gonna want a can of denatured alcohol on hand. It'll leave less residue too.
The question I have is how long will it be till the report comes out indicating that DuPont has been dumping this product and intermediate compounds into local waterways. I give it 15 years?
EDIT 2: I think they are non-toxic and inert. But I tried to find my source for this and I am failing badly. so deleting this comment
EDIT: I agree they are very waste full since they do not live that long. I have owned three non-stick pans, my cast iron pans have outlived all of them by decades.
Yes, plenty. Especially if it sticks well while needed, and then can be non-destructively undone when no longer needed.
PE sticks to itself and not much else. Packing tape is PE and adhesive. Apply PE tape to the printer bed before printing.
If that's not what is intended with the word, then what is? The transformative form of recycling, like when the soup cans from last night's dinner get sent off to China to make new cars out of?
Is that kind of recycling even possible with this substance?
PPS is not that expensive if you know some of the more specialized filament vendors.
Anyway like I said my use case is weird and may even be transient.
I can think of other use cases, but most are coatings related (Ie using Teflon as a removable masking material, etc).
The removability is actually much less interesting than the ability to strongly bond Teflon.
Which ones have this property, and which ones do not? How do we tell them apart?
How do I identify the cheap hot glue that came with the cheap hot glue gun that I bought at Dollar General on a Saturday afternoon in 2021? It does this business just fine.
[1] https://bsi-inc.com/sds_pdf/sds_un_cure.pdf
If it is scratched or heated above what it says on the label, then yes it is absolutely toxic.
But it's a bit like how the DEA has to update their list of banned substances multiple times a month because people keep coming up with new designer drugs and "research chemicals" that aren't technically banned.
I think a broader umbrella term might be POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants) though that might also be too broad to be useful. A lot of times it's their non-stick properties themselves that make them so toxic, especially to fish and smaller organisms.
The thread tape on all non-compression screw-type plumbing fittings is made of PTFE, and so is Gore-Tex.
I’m well aware of the danger of PFAS, my local watershed is contaminated with it from a 3M plant.
It’s pretty clear people have no fucking clue what makes a good adhesive.
I’ll settle for just not seeing duct tape in the 10,000 places it doesn’t belong!!
I mean, I'm not too awful worried about it compared to my adventures in 3D printing (with its crusty PTFE Bowden tubes).
But I very deliberately have just exactly one Teflon-coated pan in my house, and it only gets used for exactly one purpose: Making scrambled eggs with a rubber spatula. (I like my eggs scrambled sometimes, and I'm not pro-enough to make it work with cast iron or stainless cookware.)
Materials scientists are on the hunt for an adhesive that binds strongly to diverse surfaces and can be easily removed and reused. Conventional polymers like epoxies achieve high strength through rigid, cross-linked networks, but they are brittle and prone to sudden, catastrophic failure under stress. Conversely, adhesives used in tapes offer ductility but lack the strength for heavy-duty bonding.
Small-molecule glues utilize noncovalent bonds for adhesion, allowing the glues to be removed easily and to leave pristine surfaces behind. But they too lack tough adhesion, which is achieved when a material has both high ductility and high adhesive strength.
Now researchers have developed a small-molecule glue that not only bonds strongly to nonstick surfaces but is easily removed with ethanol (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2026, DOI: 10.1021/jacs.6c07886). “It combines adhesive strength and ductility together with easy washability, which is needed for recycling the adhesive as well as reusing the adhered objects,” Takuzo Aida, a polymer chemist at the University of Tokyo, says in an email.
The white crystalline adhesive, synthesized by Aida’s team, is a fluoro-crown ether phosphate called CyclicFP-fmoc. To test its adhesive strength, researchers first glued two untreated polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) plates by sandwiching molten CyclicFP-fmoc between them and letting it cool at room temperature for 10 min. The plates, glued to each other by a tiny contact patch of just 7 cm2, were able to hoist an 8 kg weight and registered a staggering 1.3 ± 0.1 MPa on lap-shear tensile tests, eclipsing the 0.1–0.7 MPa limits of commercial epoxies, acrylics, and silicones.
CyclicFP-fmoc binds to Teflon via strong, interfacial fluorine-fluorine (F–F) interactions, solid-state NMR spectroscopy confirmed. Meanwhile, the glue molecules hold on to each other inside the adhesive layer via hydrogen bonding between urethane units and π-π stacking of the fluorenyl rings.
Remarkably, a simple ethanol wash completely stripped CyclicFP-fmoc from the target PTFE plates, leaving no trace behind. The recovered adhesive proved repeatedly reusable, reliably maintaining its adhesive strength of ~1.2 ± 0.1 MPa across multiple cycles.
Two polytetrafluoroethylene plates joined with a new glue, called CyclicFP-fmoc, are able to lift 8 kg of weight. Credit: Kohei Kikkawa
“Since ethanol is the main component of hand sanitizer, we believe it is possible to de-bond and recycle the adhesive by using hand sanitizer as a substitute in certain real-world situations,” Aida says. He explains that due to the noncovalent bonds, recycling the adhesive simply involves a breaking of those bonds, yielding the original monomer, which can be reused with no loss of adhesive strength. “In general, this can’t be achieved by using polymer adhesives,” he adds.
Mechanical engineer Alban Sauret and bioengineer Phillip Messersmith, who were not involved in the study, both stress that it is imperative to study this molecule’s environmental fate and impact before pressing it into service.
Sauret, at the University of Maryland, found the adhesive’s combination of strength, ductility, and ethanol removability “quite unusual.” “The removable and recyclable nature of the adhesive is promising, as we would reuse fluoropolymer parts instead of discarding them,” he says. He finds it likely to be a member of the family of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) based on its fluorinated structure, “but whether it behaves like a problematic ‘forever chemical’ is a separate question.”
Messersmith, at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that existing polymer adhesives “complicate recycling efforts . . . by making it hard or impossible to separate materials in a recycling stream.” If this new adhesive is not an environmentally harmful compound, he says, “the approach could allow for easy separation and recycling of adhesively bonded materials in the future.”