Fixing carbon straight to your CD player
With climate change in the papers every day, the race to come up with the ultimate invention that will save the world is on. Richard Branson even set a $25-million prize last year for the first person or team that can come up with a reliable way of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
The race is great, competition is great, innovation is great. But solutions need to be well thought through. Sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, sadly, is not enough – especially if what the CO2 is put into goes on to do more harm.
The 235th annual meeting of the American Chemical Society today brings of news of a technique to capture CO2 emissions from smokestacks and use them to make CDs, DVDs and, well, just about anything made of hard plastic.
Plastic is made of chains of carbon, so it all makes sense and it’s wonderful to see that someone – two independent teams in fact – have worked out how to do it. (A quick search around reveals they are not the first: Novomer has been doing this for some time, though I expect their methods are different.)
The researchers call the smokestack plastics “intriguing carbon sinks”, likening them to the forests, soil and oceans that suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it.
But hold on – isn’t there a major catch to this? Less CO2 in the atmosphere is undoubtedly a good thing. But plastic, surely, is not the solution. Don’t we have enough plastic already? There’s a war on plastic bags being waged in most European countries, African and Asian landscapes are littered with them, and there is an ocean gyre in the Pacific that acts like a plastic junk magnet, sucking rubbish into a massive oceanic rubbish dump. Plastic takes 1000 years to degrade.
Send me something about CO2 emissions being transformed back into fossil fuels – that would be news and technology worth investing in. Building a stockpile of plastic is not something I would vote for.
Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter
Original em http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2008/04/fixing-carbon-straight-to-your-cd.html