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.
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.
... 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
Linux is already pure ;)
The hope is that the may be the or one of the few steps necessary to making water desalination reasonable on a massive level. For example, the Western States of the US are in constant bickering over limited water rights. This and similar technologies may bring water desalination costs down to a point where such worries about fresh water are unnecessary.
I know a lot of people love to point to conservation, but cities like Los Angeles are already conserving a lot of water. Urban areas in California only use around 10% of fresh water in the state, with agriculture using most of the rest.
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.
What happens to the plastic membrane after it absorbs the CO2? Does it get recycled? thrown out? Burned?
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
Well, you _are_ changing the total amount of water in the sea, otherwise what is the use of desalination? But that is a nit-pick, because you are correct, if you consider the _entire_ sea, the net effect will be close to zero.
But I'm not talking about net effect. Concentrated brine will kill life on the seabed, and it will kill it for many kilometres around the pipes, depending on the topography, of course. It sounds like you don't understand how concentrated brine acts in seawater. If you think it'll naturally disperse quickly, you've got a big surprise waiting. If unagitated, brine will sink to the bottom of the sea, and will hang around for a long, long time. You'll actually have a lake of brine form, and it is visibly different to the normal seawater above it. All this can quite quickly disrupt or kill off the ecosystem in a much larger area than the brine itself takes up.
The net salt content of the whole sea will be close to the same as before, but now you've destroyed any life in the area. Now you know the dangers of thinking in terms of "net effect".