Combining vegetable oils and bioactive compounds via inverse vulcanization for antioxidant and antimicrobial materials

The current great concern about plastic pollution opens up opportunities for the production of more sustainable polymers. Inverse vulcanization has emerged as a novel procedure to obtain inorganic-organic hybrid polymeric materials. Sulfur is attained as a by-product of oil refining production and makes inverse vulcanization a sustainable process due to a large amount of sulfur without a useful life. In previous studies, vegetable oils were used as a comonomer with sulfur to form copolymers based on sustainable raw material. Nevertheless, compounds from agro-wastes, could be a third comonomer that improves new copolymers bio-applications. In this study, a new series of copolymers with castor oil as vegetable oil and sulfur was formulated by adding a third compound bearing double bonds or heteroatoms. A study was conducted to assess the antimicrobial capacity and antioxidant activity of the copolymers obtained to demonstrate the benefits of adding a new comonomer to improve their bioactivity.