Slashdot Mirror
New Plastic to Cut CO2 Emissions and Purify Water
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers have lots of imagination. After developing plastic as solid as steel, other scientists from in Australia, Korea and in the U.S. have created a plastic which could cut CO2 emissions and purify water. Their new material mimics pores found in plants and is exceptionally efficient. As said one of the lead researchers, 'it can separate carbon dioxide from natural gas a few hundred times faster than current plastic membranes and its performance is four times better in terms of purity of the separated gas.' Now it remains to be seen if commercial companies are interested, either for water desalination or for natural gas processing plants."
"could cut" becomes "to cut". Probably previously in the chain there's a "might cut". No wonder we get so many hyped technologies that never deliver.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We'll just sit here in the pumpkin patch, and you can see the Great Pumpkin with your OWN EYES.
...sailing the sausage seas!
Can any medical types address the application of this material to artificial kidneys?
"Plastics, son, plastics."
Hyperic Community Manager
But does it run Linux? Or make toast?
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
"Nah", say industry groups.
"We've got enough money." They elaborate.
Honestly though - if this works out, these inherently filtering plastics would become the new... well, plastics sub-industry. Assuming the filters don't break down too rapidly, and wouldn't be inherently too limited in terms of materials/temperatures they can sort with, the variety of functions they could perform would mimic what we see in life all around us.
In addition the potential use in farming and the sciences would produce a direct benefit to humanity and our sustainability beyond the usual commercial concerns.
Ryan Fenton
Well I read TFA and the concept behind that plastic is deceptively simple: It is a membrane consisting of hourglass-shaped pores, which seemingly is a very efficient shape for pores and is also used in plant cell membranes.
So in essence, this plastic is a plant membrane in plastic form, which is not a radically advanced concept, but a really clever one and if it works as advertised, kudos to the research teams.
I would be curious if this is a net reduction of CO2 considering the processes of getting oil from oil sands in the ground to final molded plastic CO2 trap. It takes a lot of CO2 to get that oil out of the ground, process it into resin for plastic manufactoring then make the final molded CO2 trap. 4 + 4 - 2 != 0 CO2 Seems like marketing has jumped on the CO2 product marketing band wagon.
... will the CO2 emission from producing the plastic be worth the amount saved by using it?
Well, those who innovate turn once again to Parental Nature for inspiration; not entirely surprising seeing Parental Nature either has:
I just hope enough of Parental Nature is around the place for long enough before we lose the wealth of knowledge and technology which we can copy.
does "as solid as steel" mean?
This space available.
Surely that's a highly toxic metal (at least its compounds are)? Does that cancel out the good this will do?
-1 not first post
No need for /. to overhype. Leave that to USA Today.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I would like to see a plastic that can purify ethanol, instead of using the extremely inefficient method of boiling to distill the ethanol. All that boiling is one of the big reasons ethanol is impractical in the US. (we don't have the climate for sugarcane)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Perhaps they're referring to the state? Although if it's a plastic, it's probably an amorphous solid and lacks a crystalline structure like steel.
"New Plastic to Cut CO2 Emissions and Purify Water" The question is... can it cook as well?
"exceptionally efficient"
If that is right then we are facing the possibility of solid-rock-ice-earth.
What happens to the plastic membrane after it absorbs the CO2? Does it get recycled? thrown out? Burned?
You complain about Roland Piquepaille. I actually find more insight into just one story submitted by Roland than all of the stories submitted by Twitter. If you want to complain about anyone, complain about twitter and all of his FUD that is submitted as stories.
I agree the press release is misleading, however this method seems to provide a cheaper/faster way to separate gases, which is potentially beneficial for many industrial or laboratory processes. For the real details check the abstract in Science or the full article if available. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5848/254
Could a variant of this extract CO2 directly from air, by making the pores big enough for O2 and N but not CO2? Probably not scalable to scrubbing global-warming agents from the atmosphere, but might be useful for extracting carbon from air to combine with hydrogen from wind or nuclear, to product synthetic methane or liquid fuel. The alternative is to use carbon from biomass, but that requires harvesting and transportation; pulling it straight out of air would be simpler.
In my opinion the press release distorted somewhow the facts in an attempt to make it more understandable. According to the article in science they actually don't know for sure what the shape of the material. Based on absorption experiments they assume the pore structure is similar to that of activated carbon or zeolites, instead of the pore structure of usual polymer membranes.
That isn't logical. You are saying we should accept abuse because there are other abusers?
I'm sure some bright spot will be able to explain it away. How now they have a new technology that can do it faster, cheaper and better than ever before-- and yet somehow, in the end, it will translate to more cost to the consumer.
Any improvement in desalination is a welcome one. We need big desalination plants around the world to feasibly meet demands for fresh water.
This is my sig.
"Living in the Plastic Age"... by the BUGGLES
(Which I always thought was fucking GAY, including the freaks that played it, but, there you go, it fits!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_in_the_Plastic_Age
LOL!
It doesn't change the fact that we use plastics more often than we should. Melting plastic requires significantly more energy than melting glass. Recycling plastic also requires significantly more energy than recycling glass. Additionally, plastic can only be recycled a few times. Glass, on the other hand, has a much longer life.
How about we bring back the glass bottles? We're already losing the glass beer bottles to plastic ones. I say we reverse the tide, and go back to glass Coke bottles. And wouldn't it be nice if those milk jugs were actually re-used?
I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't find better plastics. All I'm saying is that I think, in addition to researching new plastics, we take time to look at the alternatives to plastics. Sometimes the old-fashioned methods work just as well, if not better, than new methods. You havn't seen a more efficient wheel invented in the last few thousand years, have you?
Now now, the CSIRO are actually a respectable scientific body that research and develop countless products, dont believe me? Have a look at 802.11n (for example)
From the Article:
"This plastic will help solve problems of small molecule separation, whether related to clean coal technology, separating greenhouse gases, increasing the energy efficiency of water purification, or producing and delivering energy from hydrogen," Dr Anita Hill of CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering said.
"The ability of the new plastic to separate small molecules surpasses the limits of any conventional plastics."
"It can separate carbon dioxide from natural gas a few hundred times faster than current plastic membranes and its performance is four times better in terms of purity of the separated gas."
All wishy washyness about the abilities of the substance is the editorialising of slashdot and the writer of the article
(802.11n link with a fairly complete look at the picture: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070924-dark-australian-patent-cloud-looms-over-802-11n-spec.html though it does kind of skirt around the fact that the CSIRO were ripped off in the past by the worldwide adoption clause and they are attempting to avoid the same again )
Can't we all just get along
Great. The last thing we need are more plastics in our water supply http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/mixing-plastic-food-urban-legend?page=3
What's funny too is he linked to the wrong article. See
No sig for you!!
Maybe I'm just really tired, but it seems to me that if you varied the size and shape of the pores, you'd have a really simple way to do a wholesale analysis sample for complex molecules. You could have a "nose" for smelling in either liquid or air, allowing you to have a sensor that looked for all sorts of contaminants and gave immediate results.
Perhaps, if these plastics were non-toxic, you could even have a plug in test that gave an immediate bacteriological or viral assay of a blood sample. So, instead of relying on a bizarre and arbitrary set of symptoms of a patient to look for an illness, you could just scan their blood and get an immediate diagnosis from a computer, and then get antibiotics immediately.
This is my sig.
"Melting plastic requires significantly more energy than melting glass."
I hold in my hands a plastic bottle and a glass bottle, both used to have beer in them.
I take my butane lighter, spark it, and hold the flame to the bottom of the plastic. Within seconds, it's melting and burning. I do that to the glass bottle, and I'll burn thru that whole lighter's fuel supply (which is energy) before I even turn the glass red.
I'll say it probably takes more energy to melt glass rather than plastic.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I see pollution of another kind here....yes plastics are not good, when we build them we cant recycle them so to speak without causing a lot of pollution, but we could always grind them down, and then use them as filler or something, but now that is solid as steel, how the hell would we grind them???
Anyone have links about the recycling of plastics, would be a welcomed response, as I have a small interest in knowing about this.
Hey, people, so far, in reading the comment sections, I have yet to see a single anti-MS rant. Can we get it together and start bashing MS?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
- it separates small molecules from larger ones very quickly
- at a higher purity level than current membranes,
- and it does so at a higher temperature.
What this presumably means is that a properly used filter could be used to clean up combustion related gases, etc., returning the unburned hydrocarbons to a burner perhaps, and allowing the the remaining C02 and water molecules to be further processed later on.The next step in the line is the one that I think is the holy grail here -- to be able to separate the water and H20 from the exhaust air stream for sequestration and whatever the presumably purified water vapor would be useful for....Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...