> “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.
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?
Who says this will be a specialized adhesive? If it works as advertised, it could be a super-glue alternative with easy unglueability. That would be an attractive consumer product; and the type of product that could easily end up on someones hands.
Superglue is probably two order of magnitude stronger, so I doubt that this will replace cyanoacrylates. And while ethanol or hand sanitizer will not help much with superglue, acetone or nail polish remover will remove it. Then again, acetone will attack more materials then ethanol, so a glue that can be removed with ethanol might still be beneficial.
Also… Uncure is a popular brand of cyanoacrylate remover. This is already a solved problem it seems.
Never heard that name, but according to their safety data sheet [1] it is 95+ % dimethylformamide [2]. Not too different from acetone, with a additional dimethylamin group. Acetone-free nail polish remover usually contains primarily ethyl acetate [3] which is also structurally similar.
[1] https://bsi-inc.com/sds_pdf/sds_un_cure.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylformamide
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethyl_acetate
Wow, speaking of safety -- I just looked it up to see if Un-Cure superglue/CA debonder would be safe enough to use on hands, or would just cause the chemicals to be broken down and absorbed through the skin at a fast rate too (which I personally wouldn't want), and the initial results I see say that it's ok to use on hands. Wow again.
It must be extremely low vapor pressure compared to acetone. Little smell and not an ultra airtight lid. Lasts forever.
3M will fight for this patent
I can think of a few things that relate, as someone who is more in the business of taking random things apart for repair than building them new:
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.
I think you misread...the quote is about recycling the adhesive itself with hand sanitizer, not pieces assembled with it. Running an industrial recycling process with unwanted hand sanitizer as a solvent is peak comedy.
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.
I interpreted "recycle" as ~synonymous with "reuse," which is a valid and common way of using the word.
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?
Hand sanitizer is also contaminated with other crap... presumably that impacts the adhesive if you're attempting to "recycle" it? I agree, what a weird line.
Assuming it is even ethanol based in the first place, not all. (more than one alcoholic has ended up in the ER thinking all of them are)
One example might be ungluing a lithium pouch cell (usually polyamide film outer surface, which is a pretty low-surface-energy polymer) for home replacement. Electrically-debonded adhesives are a better option here, but not sure what the cost trade-offs look like.
Gelled solvents are useful for softening adhesives in certain situations far better than the pure substance
Stick on nails
Maybe a 2026 remake of MacGyver?