Plastic is everywhere in our lives these days, it is necessary for modern human life. But because of how much plastic we produce and discard we also have to come up with ways of dealing with the plastic we don\u2019t use anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From water bottles and grocery bags to car dashboards, recycling becomes a challenge<\/a> especially because every kind of plastic type has to be separated beforehand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some kinds of plastics are very similar though. By observing this, scientists managed to come up with a new clever laboratory process that can feed 3 of the most common plastics into a single reactor, that then produces hydrogen gas<\/a> that is more than 90% pure. Not only that: it also prevents nearly all direct carbon dioxide emissions by mixing carbon with solid materials in its process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Only a measly 9 percent<\/a> of discarded plastic is recycled, while up to 79 percent of it goes to landfills<\/a> and 12 percent is burned down, which is not only a waste but also a terrible way of dealing with it due to all the harmful gases it produces. But sorting needs trained personnel for now, which raises the costs and slows the recycling down, so the mixed waste barely has any value once it eventually arrives at the disposal facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 3 common plastics that are now being targeted are the PET, the PE and the PP, respectively meaning polyethylene terephthalate, polyethylene, and polypropylene. Those are the most common components of the plastics that we use in our daily lives be it bottles, bags, or car parts, but at the same time their chemistry usually makes them hard to process together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And why is the purity of hydrogen a matter of importance? A united team of scientists from the UCLA<\/a> and Ewha Womans University tried a previously known method called \u201calkaline thermal treatment\u201d. Translating to simpler terms it means that the sodium hydroxide when under heat reacts with the plastic and helps with the hydrogen release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This method was conceived out of an earlier carbon-neutral process<\/a> that turned biomass such as seaweed into hydrogen. The new team took advantage of it and adapted it for plastic, finding out that the PETs could produce highly pure hydrogen if the temperatures were around 540 to 720 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the conventional steam gasification.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy mixed plastic is so difficult<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Read More: A new reactor turned bottles, bags and car plastics into hydrogen, and the carbon problem stayed trapped in solid material<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Turning waste into hydrogen<\/h2>\n\n\n\n