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New CO2 Harvester Could Help Scrub the Air

Posted by Soulskill on from the plantlife-now-obsolete dept.

sciencehabit sends this excerpt from ScienceNOW: "Researchers in California have produced a cheap plastic capable of removing large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. Down the road, the new material could enable the development of large-scale batteries and even form the basis of 'artificial trees' that lower atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in an effort to stave off catastrophic climate change."

2 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How are you going to power that? by Inda · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Plants manage the job fine with sunlight and water.

    This is the future. Trees turned into biomass wood pellets. It's cheaper to convert coal power stations to biomass than to build new ones.

    The cycle is nearly complete.

    --
    This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
  2. Regeneration systems by domatic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The thought of giant CO2 scrubbing plastic trees seems like hyperbole to me. Seems we could plant real trees that work about as well for that. But an obvious application jumped out at me. Undersea vehicles, labs, manned spacecraft, and any other artificially maintained environment that humans have to work in need to remove CO2 because it can be poisonous in sufficiently high concentrations even if there is enough to breathe.

    So would this material make good scrubbers for sealed environments people have to work in? If there is a way to vent the waste gases, being able to drive the CO2 off with a bit of heat and using again seems a great feature too.