The emergence of biodegradable materials has greatly solved the problem of environmental pollution caused by plastics, but there are still challenges in how to balance the thermal properties, mechanical properties and degradation properties of materials. In this work, a series of poly(butylene terephthalate-co-glycolic acid) (PBTGA) copolyesters with high molecular weights and different glycolic acid content were synthesized via bulk melt polycondensation. TGA demonstrated that the thermal decomposition temperature of all copolyesters were above 360 °C, which indicated the copolyesters had excellent thermal stability. DSC and XRD showed that the crystallization of the copolyester was deteriorated with the increase of glycolic acid content, corresponding to melting temperature decreased. The copolyesters had tensile strength of 18.7–46.2 MPa, tensile modulus of 20–1061 MPa and elongation at break between 196–487%. Degradation experiments showed that the weight loss of PBTGA copolyesters in 12 weeks was more than 20%. Through the copolymerization of GA and BT units, GA not only endowed the copolyesters with the ability of rapid degradation, but also kept the copolyesters excellent performance. Therefore, the PBTGAs we synthesized gave us a potential possibility to solve the problem of the plastic pollution.

可生物降解材料的出现极大地解决了塑料对环境的污染问题，但如何平衡材料的热性能、力学性能和降解性能仍存在挑战。在这项工作中，通过本体熔融缩聚合成了一系列具有高分子量和不同乙醇酸含量的聚对苯二甲酸丁二醇酯-共聚乙醇酸 (PBTGA) 共聚酯。TGA表明，所有共聚酯的热分解温度均在360 ℃以上，表明共聚酯具有优异的热稳定性。DSC和XRD表明，随着乙醇酸含量的增加，共聚聚酯的结晶度降低，对应的熔融温度降低。共聚酯的拉伸强度为 18.7-46.2 MPa，拉伸模量为 20–1061 MPa，断裂伸长率为 196–487%。降解实验表明，PBTGA共聚酯在12周内减重超过20%。通过GA和BT单元的共聚，GA不仅赋予了共聚酯快速降解的能力，而且保持了共聚酯的优良性能。因此，我们合成的 PBTGA 为我们解决塑料污染问题提供了潜在的可能性。