Chapter 11: Plant Oil-based Plasticizers

With the rising price and the gradual depletion of petrochemical resources, the issues of energy and environmental protection have attracted increasing concern. Renewable alternatives are cheap and environmentally friendly materials, and they became a hotspot in the plastic industry. The introduction of renewable biomass resources to prepare biomass polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plasticizers can realize the purpose of environmental protection and resource saving. Among all the biomass resources, vegetable oil-based plasticizers have come into the sight of researchers with their remarkable advantages of biodegradability, hypotoxicity, low price, excellent solvent resistance and so on. In this chapter, vegetable oil-based plasticizers are classified on the basis of their chemical structures and functionality, and the multifunctional industrial applications of plasticizers are discussed.