Herein, we report a facile, one-pot, green, and solvent-less (solid-state) mechanochemical approach toward the synthesis of eco-friendly polyurethanes (PUs) at room temperature using biomass-derived 2,5-bis­(hydroxymethyl)­furan (BHMF) combined with vibration milling. This approach is simple, straightforward, and very fast even at room temperature because of the instantaneous energy generated during grinding. BHMF, a biomass-derived monomer, was successfully used to synthesize PUs via ball milling; the resulting PUs have a maximal M w of 163k and are flexible (T g = 96 °C) and thermally stable (T d = 197 °C). In addition, ball milling enabled the synthesis of PU copolymers with various diols and diamines, resulting in variation of the polymer properties, such as the glass transition temperature (T g).

Bis(hydroxymethyl)furan (BHMF) is a promising biomass‐derived polymer platform, but it is incompatible with traditional methods used for synthesizing polycarbonates (PCs) owing to its thermal instability. In this study, BHMF‐based furanic (FR) PCs were prepared successfully at a relatively low temperature through the mediation of carbonyldiimidazole. The low Tg of aliphatic FR‐PCs was controlled elaborately, exploiting the reactivity of furan in the Diels–Alder reactions and the molecular rigidity of the resulting oxabicycles. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part A: Polym. Chem. 2019, 57, 1796–1800

This work shows that the shape-controlled microporous organic polymer (MOP) can be utilized for the morphological engineering of another class of MOP materials. The morphology of a hyper-cross-linked polymer (HCP) was successfully engineered on the hollow conjugated microporous polymer (CMP). Through the postsynthetic modification of HCP bearing BINOLs (HCP-B) on the hollow CMP-like material (H-CMPL), the HCP bearing BINOL phosphoric acid (HCP-BP) was engineered on the H-CMPL platform. The resultant H-CMPL@HCP-BP showed good catalytic performance as a heterogeneous catalytic system and excellent recyclability in the ring-opening polymerization of ε-caprolactones to poly­(caprolactone).