I remember reading about something like this 20 years ago that seemed promising, but ended up only handling non plastic waste. Specifically waste from turkey processors if I remember correctly. The article said something about anything into oil, but it didn’t work out that way. I’m glad that folks are still researching this, but we really just need to have less plastic waste.
We could ALSO stop producing and using so much damn plastic. Just sayin’.
The problem isnt plastic, the problem is a disposable society.
as long as we have a disposable society, we’re gonna generate monstrous piles of of waste. And its gonna be the same for whatever replaces plastic, and then we’ll be having these conversations about that material.
No, the problem is definitely that we produce anything at all out of plastic that doesn’t strictly require it for whatever reason. Some medical applications are probably good examples. Anything that doesn’t strictly need to be plastic just grinds down to microplastics, contributing to their pollution of every last environment we check on earth. Every plastic product produced is one in which a business has forced their externalities onto the rest of society instead of addressing them themselves.
I like plastic pipes. They’re not strictly necessary, but I figure they’re better than lead and brass pipes.
What about glass pipes? They’re fragile but far more eco friendly and cheaper than pvc/plastic. Stainless steel could hold up to, clay is the oldest form of piping that isn’t harmful,
Cast iron could also be used if there’s no air introduced within the water supply though while popular among some we can easily say its a dumb and expensive idea.
That problem is actually just billionaires even existing but blamed on the little guy
The problem is plastic.
“…in a petri dish”
But seriously, this doesn’t make any sense to my ( chemisty course flunking ) head:
They have made a device that uses sunlight to break down plastic waste and turn it into hydrogen. And it’s not just a lab curiosity. The team made it using simple methods and materials, and have tested it outside in the sunlight.
Where does the carbon go? What about the oxygen? Does the sun burn them? I don’t get it
I suspect that the leftovers can be processed more easily. It would be nice of the article to talk about what residuals are left.
Organic chem is fun. It’s also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.
Short answer? This substrate produces H2, formate and acetate. The carbon would mostly be dissolving via formic acid into formate.
Long answer?
Organic Chemistry is literally magic, don’t think about it too hard unless you’ve dedicated your life to it.
It’s also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.
I loved biology and statistics, and was pretty neutral towards calculus, but for some reason, chemistry is incomprehensible to me (Physics too, but that’s because neither the teacher nor I knew how to use my Casio graphing calculator, so I tried to do all the math on paper and ended up wasting the whole class doing arithmetic instead of listening-I’ve thought about taking a basic physics course at a community college, but I don’t think even that would help with chemistry).
My sister’s a science teacher and was taking masters level organic chemistry classes while I was taking high school chemistry. At one point she showed me some of her coursework and I literally decided in that moment that I didn’t want to study biology badly enough to go through organic chemistry.
That sounds like she’s a really bad teacher, lol, but my strengths are definitely in different areas, so it’s also a fair insight.
Here a [Co4Zr2O(OnPr)10(acac)4] single-source precursor is deposited onto Al-doped SrTiO3 […]
what the…?!?
Statements dreamt up by the utterly deranged /s
They are playing us for fools
burn any hydrocarbon, you get hydrogen/water and C02.
That’s bad
from the article (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44286-026-00406-y) linked in the article:
Besides H2 evolution, the oxidation products from the photocatalytic reforming process were also analyzed using ion chromatography and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The major oxidation products detected after 22 h were formate and acetate (from pretreated cellulose), as well as glycolaldehyde (GAld) dimer and glycolate (from pretreated PET),
seems very resources intensive, and with specific reagents/chemicals.
incomplete combustion, likely some nasty nitrates in there.
We’ll just dump them in the ocean. Nothing bad has ever happened from just dumping things in the ocean.
It was very nice to see some good news today. If this can go at scale, then it will solve a whole lot of problems.
It won’t. Stop using plastic?
Yes stop using plastic without being an unnecessary ass.
The spray-coating method cuts the cost to produce the reactors significantly, which should make them easier to produce at scale. But the hydrogen right now is still too expensive. According to a press release, the researchers still need to improve the durability and efficiency of the reactors.
Not feasible yet though
like it has been for 10+years, they should stop trying with hydrogen. just stick to solar, wind, ,etc.
The hydrogen comes from plastic so it’s arguably not “clean” as it still comes from fossil fuels.
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It’s pure plastic waste at that point. No one is going to be making plastic bottles for the purpose of dissembling them into hydrogen fuel anymore than they are currently making plastic bottles for the purpose of sending to waste-to-energy plants (incinerators).
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It’s not just plastic. It’s plants too; ideally agricultural and industrial byproducts.
Solar reforming has emerged as a class of sunlight-driven technologies capable of converting waste-derived substrates into fuels and chemicals. By utilizing substrates such as glucose or ethylene glycol (EG), derived from lignocellulosic biomass or polyethylene terephthalate (PET), as electron donors, solar reforming enables a more energetically favorable oxidation pathway compared with water oxidation.
- source: the paper linked in the article (emphasis mine)
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Bad news: over 90% of plastic with those recycle tags end up exported and burned to make electricity.
It’s also burnt to make cement. Or just burnt, in Spain “mysterious fires” in sorting/recycling plants that only affected the plastic trash were pretty common after China stopped importing ship containers filled with mixed and unrecyclable plastics. I don’t know what is going on now, blessed ignorance, fuck reality.
Better than letting the plastic pile up.
But the C doesn’t disappear.
According to the original paper, the C goes into “value-added organics such as formate, acetate, glycolate and glycolaldehyde dimer.”
So specifically not carbon dioxide, which is the problem gas.
It’s still in the world, instead of a hole in the ground, and will go CO² the next opportunity.
This is the problem with oil; no matter what steps you do inbetween (be it fuel or plastic, or recycling/processing the plastic), it will still accelerate climate warming in the end.
Oh noes not the C!
What is “the C”? In this context
Carbon. The stuff that prefers to be in a gaseous & bound form to do heat house effect, which we take out of the ground where it got to in times with significant warmer global climate.
Agreed but at least if this is scalable, it is a solution to one problem.
