When it comes to things like plastics, you have cheap, lightweight, and durable – pick two. That’s all about to change, however, thanks to scientists from IBM Research. They claim they’ve found a way to create plastics that are lightweight, incredibly strong and cheap to produce. Perhaps best of all, the polymers are said to be 100% recyclable down to their original materials.

“Although there has been significant work in high-performance materials, today’s engineered polymers still lack several fundamental attributes. New materials innovation is critical to addressing major global challenges, developing new products and emerging disruptive technologies,” said James Hedrick, Advanced Organic Materials Scientist, IBM Research.

Modern polymers are still incredibly limited. Their biggest flaw is probably durability – environmental exposure, particularly in fields like aerospace, mean that polymers are vulnerable to all sorts of external factors, most of them detrimental. Also, the high heat used in their formation typically inhibits their ability to be fully recycled. By contrast, the new polymers developed by IBM rely on high-tech computing and a better understanding of how molecules react in chemical processed to address these issues.

As for what advantages these new materials have, the better (and easier) question might be which ones they don’t. These new materials are the first to demonstrate resistance to cracking, strength higher than bone, the ability to reform to their original shape (self-heal), all while being completely recyclable back to their starting material. They can apparently also be transformed into even newer polymer structures, which improves their strength by about 50%.

What’s more, these new polymers are born out of the same starting materials as present technologies. Though the process is as yet proprietary to IBM, it involves joining molecules together through a condensation reaction. Yet another of these materials transforms into a gel-like consistency at room temperature, making it still stronger than normal polymers while remaining flexible. These are the so-called “self-healing” polymers, which restore themselves when placed in physical proximity through hydrogen-bonding interactions in the hemiaminal polymer network.

Hopefully, these new technologies will soon have applications in transportation, microelectronic or advanced manufacturing. Check out a video with more information below: