Transforming Styrofoaminto Functional OrganosulfurPolymers for Surface Modification and Antimicrobial Coating

Polystyrene (PS) recovered from commodity styrofoam food containers was chemically transformed into an organosulfur polymer that serves as a versatile precursor to a suite of value-added materials with tunable functionality. Specifically, we subjected untreated commodity PS to sequential halomethylation and thiolation to afford a styrenic polymer bearing pendent methyl thioether groups. This macromolecular organosulfur platform enables systematic postfunctionalization to generate materials featuring pendent sulfoxide, sulfone, or sulfonium moieties. Importantly, these functional polymers exhibit distinct physicochemical characteristics that may be exploited to modulate solid surface wettability or to imbue flexible cotton textiles with antimicrobial properties against multiple clinically relevant pathogens. Collectively, this work demonstrates that low-cost consumer-grade styrofoam waste can be upcycled via facile chemistry into polymers with modifiable wettability and potentially useful biological activity.