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> “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.
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.
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.

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
I will refer you to my ER physician friends, who have stories of people attempting to use adhesives of all varieties in the most absurd ways. People will apparently attempt to put anything, anywhere.
Stick on nails
Supergluing your fingers together or other bits of skin is also a well known issue people face when using glue. So it could just be a hedge against people's fears
I read it as "specifically for ptfe" too. Where would you glue that? (Heart surgery?)
Maybe a 2026 remake of MacGyver?
I guess one of my favorite old-school websites will need to get updated, ThisToThat [0].

[0] - https://www.thistothat.com

This website often suggests totally bad ideas, like brittle epoxies for bonds they shouldn't be used for.

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/

It's been a while since I've seen such an ad-plagued site.
There's an endless stream of non-stick pans in Goodwills. I feel bad for the people that don't know better and buy used non-stick pans and I also feed bad about the sheer amount of waste being generated. It would be incredible if this could be used to get rid of scratched up or otherwise unsafe non-stick coatings to the point that the pan is still food safe
delete

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.

Budding armchair polymer chemists: The article specifically states this adhesive works by way of flourine-flourine bonds (found in PFAS and flourocarbon materials).

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.

I saw this and was immediately excited for use with UHMWPE. Too bad it doesn't work on polyethylenes
It's like soap for fluorine compounds.
I'm thankful they are researching the environmental impact of this. The last thing we need is another PFAS debacle decades later.
No kidding. Fluoro-anything needs to be checked out for impact on the ozone layer, problems that happens when it burns, and problems that happens when it flakes off and gets ingested by people.
Yay more sources of weird forever chemicals. And while it’s been a long time since I had ochem, there’s quite a few places this molecule looks like it can break apart.

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.

Interesting that it seems like the application method is to melt the glue:

> 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 ;)

For anybody not getting the reference, standard glue gun glue is obviously applied freshly melted and hot, and it is dissolved/debonded cleanly with isopropyl alcohol.
Among cyanoacrylates, Permabond 105 does a pretty good job bonding teflon, if you use their primer.
I'm very impressed that they were able to use glue on PTFE for...approximately anything at all. That's impressive.

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.

I have an electric guitar which has an uncovered electronic cavity in the back, where the volume pot is mounted, and all wiring passing through it. I have a DPDT sliding switch there which is just held by hot glue to the side of the cavity, and recessed in a bit so that it isn't accidentally moved. It's been that way for years. From time to time it used to come off spontaneously, requiring a re-gluing, but I learned to do it better.

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.

There are many different hot glues, not all have that property.
My mind immediately jumped to The Mote In God's Eye.
In what context would one re-use a glue like this?
I have a weird use case, but this is actually wildly useful to me.

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.

At the risk of asking a really dumb question: Does this only work on PTFE or other flourine-compound surfaces?
IANA chemist but my guess is that it's of particular interest because PTFE surfaces are especially non-stick, and non-PTFE surfaces have good options that require less exotic chemistry.

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?

I really want to see this tested on HDPE. A simple, reliable adhesive for polyethylene could be a game changer.
> it is imperative to study this molecule’s environmental fate and impact before pressing it into service.

Yes, let's do that, this time.

Sounds like a super-cool and useful molecule, but externalities can be killer.

Isn't high-ductility associated with creep, especially under static loads? That would seem to be a downside of an adhesive like this.
I thought of the seal defeat of using acetone on envelopes...to solve the challenge ofc from Defcon
This might be very useful for bonding PTFE and aluminium on cookware if it ends up being food safe.
Any reason to think this flower of fluorines (seriously, that thing looks INTENSE) would be any more environmentally safe than PFOA?
I really don't know about food safe. Or safe for any end consumer, really. They absolutely need to do some severe toxicity testing. Because this funny new glue is an organic phosphate which in itself already raises some serious questions. On top of that, the ring also contains two perfluoropinacol moieties which could be released e.g. on heating or through interaction with acids or something else. This is a highly volatile molecule and "fatal in contact with skin," i.e. of the highest toxicity class. That ain't no good.
If you don't cook with ethanol that is...

  s/^/This /
That is a deeply scary looking compound.
On the left hand side we see a lot very unhappy carbon.
Could this be used for hanging things from walls without damaging them?
Is there really a use for this(temporary adhesives) outside of Fixturing?