… And what happens with the other chemicals and elements, mainly the carbon? Does it spit out graphite dust or something, or does it just spits out the good ol carbon dioxide?
We could ALSO stop producing and using so much damn plastic. Just sayin’.
We could recycle bottle plastic instead of burning it to make hydrogen. Take two steps back an this is stupid.
The problem isnt plastic, the problem is a disposable society.
as long as we have a disposable society, we’re gonna generate monstrous piles of of waste. And its gonna be the same for whatever replaces plastic, and then we’ll be having these conversations about that material.
No, the problem is definitely that we produce anything at all out of plastic that doesn’t strictly require it for whatever reason. Some medical applications are probably good examples. Anything that doesn’t strictly need to be plastic just grinds down to microplastics, contributing to their pollution of every last environment we check on earth. Every plastic product produced is one in which a business has forced their externalities onto the rest of society instead of addressing them themselves.
I like plastic pipes. They’re not strictly necessary, but I figure they’re better than lead and brass pipes.
Brass pipes? Are you thinking of copper?
Copper pipes are about as close as we can get to perfect, and as solderless press-fit connections get better, is just as easy to install as any of the plastic options
Expensive, bend easily, much more heavy. I just see advantages in plastic pipes and no disadvantages.
For water it’s probably introducing more microplatics to your water. For waste pipes the are louder and a fire hazard. You can’t use them on 3 story plus buildings.
You need specialized tools to bend the copper pipes used in plumbing, and if you don’t, you’re using the wrong kind of copper or got scammed.
They’re a bit more expensive than plastic options, sure, but they also have a 2-3 times longer life expectancy, and in good conditions, copper pipes can last over a century without issue.
They may be heavier than plastic pipes, sure, but I wouldn’t classify a copper pipe as “heavy”, you know what I mean? Like, a child can carry around a few 10 foot sticks of 1/2 inch type L copper no problem. They’re more durable though, so they can actually support their own weight in a lot of situations where plastic pipes need extra support.
A 10 meter long 40 cm diameter copper pipe is quite heavy. If you have to dig the asphalt to fix something it isn’t that difficult to bend or perforate. Sure, you’ll break a plastic pipe as well in that situation, but that is quite an easier fix.
Regarding how long they last, to be fair I have no idea. I’d imagine a PVC pipe can easily last some 30 years, I don’t know whether a copper pipe will last much longer. It could be I guess. What I can say, when I had to deal with copper pipes I was just happier to replace them with plastic pipes; much easier to work with. Want to take a section of the piping off to check what’s wrong? Very easy with plastic pipes, will take you a couple minutes without any tool. If you want to do the same with copper pipes most likely you have to cut them and then solder them back or attach them with some kind of fitting.
What about glass pipes? They’re fragile but far more eco friendly and cheaper than pvc/plastic. Stainless steel could hold up to, clay is the oldest form of piping that isn’t harmful,
Cast iron could also be used if there’s no air introduced within the water supply though while popular among some we can easily say its a dumb and expensive idea.
Plastic pipes have great advantages over all those materials: they’re cheap, light and sturdy.
If properly disposed they don’t pollute much since they last many years and basically do not degrade.
I doubt making a city pipeline out of glass pipes would be viable.
Mm that’s totally fair. Just hope that the material can be better recycled/decomposed in some way :P
Glass takes a huge amount of energy to make.
It is? Ah damn :(
That problem is actually just billionaires even existing but blamed on the little guy
The problem is plastic.
Plastic wouldnt be produced by the megaton for disposable packaging, water bottles, etc, if we didnt have a disposable society. The waterways wouldnt be full of plastic trash and contamination if we didnt have a disposable society.
See, this is the problem with humanity. It always wants to hyper focus on the surface issue, and adamantly refuse to acknowledge the deeper, subsurface issues that made them sprout to begin with. Because humanity struggles to care about that which it can not see/easily acknowledge. Plastic is a big, visible problem everyone wants to deal with, but dealing with a disposable society? Thats to hard to think about. Thats too uncomfortable. That might affect me, personally, in an way that annoys me, so we just gotta keep soldiering on and ignore that.
Plastic isn’t durable. Eventually it degraded to UV and needs to get thrown away.
The solution is to use paper and glass, not plastic, where possible
and wax paper turns into smothering, suffocating mush, and glass becomes dangerous, sharp shards.
and thats what you’ll be dealing with until you deal with the root of the problem, which is a disposable society. Because that will not only stop the excess waste and production of disposable bullshit, not just containers and bottles, but TVs, electronics, etc etc. Much of that latter stuff being shipped off to third world where the desperate dissolve it in carcinogens and burn it to extract precious metals from the shit westerners throw away in excess.
One of the first steps to getting away from a disposable society is by advocating for more non-disposable container options, like glass. You don’t jump straight to tackling the incredibly difficult disposable electronics problem and ignore the easy problem of reusable and recyclable containers.
One of the first steps to getting away from a disposable society is by advocating for more non-disposable container options, like glass
I am assuming I’m the only one around here old enough to remember when it was dangerous to go barefoot because of the preponderance of broken glass everywhere due to disposable society treating glass bottles and other glass products like they treat plastic today.
Glass doesnt magically make society non disposable. As I have said, repeatedly. Getting rid of plastic wont cure a disposable society, it will only just make whatever replaces plastic the new waste dejure to end up everywhere and threaten everything in its own new ways, until you fundamentally change society by having strict fines, personal repercussions, and public shaming. . as well as education and wide spread access of disposal receptacles, and a waste recycling system that doesnt just dump 90% of its collected recyclables into a landfill.
Everyone wants to keep hyper focusing on plastic, plastic isnt the issue. Plastic is just the fever. The fever isnt what is making you sick. its the appendix about to detonate in your lower abdomen, but everyone wants to ignore the appendix and hyper focus on the fever, because the fever is easy to see.
Wax paper is compostable and glass is reusable and recyclable indefinitely (unlike plastic)
Neither glass nor paper contains carcinogens.
We have to do both. Passing laws mandating beer bottles to use standard sizes and have deposits is usually the first step. Then you can do that with soda and every other item sold in plastic.
We have to do both. Passing laws mandating beer bottles to use standard sizes and have deposits is usually the first step. Then you can do that with soda and every other item sold in plastic.
I love how you are arguing against dealing with a disposable society, by using examples and arguments on how to deal with a disposable society.
Literal cant see the forest for the trees moment.
I remember reading about something like this 20 years ago that seemed promising, but ended up only handling non plastic waste. Specifically waste from turkey processors if I remember correctly. The article said something about anything into oil, but it didn’t work out that way. I’m glad that folks are still researching this, but we really just need to have less plastic waste.
Plastic is made out of more than just hydrogen and the article doesn’t mention anything about what else comes out of this device or what happens to the bits that aren’t hydrogen.
Like I’m guessing this is more of a “way to mine hydrogen out of certain types of platic waste” than a “we’ve solved plastic waste and hydrogen production!” Not saying it’s a bad thing, just that part of the story is still missing that could turn this from amazing to just good (or maybe even not good depending on what exactly happens to the rest of the material).
Oh also just thought of another angle that could become problematic like CO2 generation over the centuries has resulted in global warming: if that device only produces hydrogen from the plastic and not 1 oxygen molecule for every 2 hydrogens, burning that hydrogen will use up oxygen and create more water.
Compared to hydrogen produced from electrolysis that also produces the balancing oxygen and uses up water such that the ratio of H and O as well as the total amount of water doesn’t change over time.
At small scales, it doesn’t really matter, but the same could be said for basically any pollution and well gestures around. It didn’t start out like this for any of them.
“…in a petri dish”
But seriously, this doesn’t make any sense to my ( chemisty course flunking ) head:
They have made a device that uses sunlight to break down plastic waste and turn it into hydrogen. And it’s not just a lab curiosity. The team made it using simple methods and materials, and have tested it outside in the sunlight.
Where does the carbon go? What about the oxygen? Does the sun burn them? I don’t get it
Organic chem is fun. It’s also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.
Short answer? This substrate produces H2, formate and acetate. The carbon would mostly be dissolving via formic acid into formate.
Long answer?
Organic Chemistry is literally magic, don’t think about it too hard unless you’ve dedicated your life to it.
Inorganic chemistry is fairly simple and fun as long as you keep it in the lab. Industrial-scale inorganic chemistry gets ridiculously complicated because all the reactants and products are complicated and messy. Also, a large reactor will have all sorts of gradients, which means that the reactions take place in unfavourable conditions all the time. None of it is ideal, and none of it follows simplified laws or rules very well.
Sure, we have all sorts of fancy calculations, but none of them predict very accurately what’s going to happen and when. Even the best models and theories give approximate and crude answers when you’re dealing with messy industrial-scale chemistry.
Models give you a rough idea, lab experiments give you a decent idea, but running the process at full scale is the only way to find out exactly how those reactions really work in real life.
Turns out, our theories are too simple to handle complicated solutions. They can predict the behaviour of simple solutions very well, but that’s not good enough. In real life, you rarely have well behaved clean reagents.
This comment is chilling. Makes me think we should be thankful that chem plants aren’t just constantly going boom.
Dangers like that can be identified quite easily. It’s a qualitative thing, and qualitative chemistry is pretty robust. For instance, we can say that there’s a risk that a particular reaction will produce hydrogen under specific circumstances. We’ll just build the plant accordingly instead of trusting that we can always operate the plant correctly. Sooner or later, you’ll end up running the plant in the wrong way, and you’ll produce some hydrogen, so it’s good to have a plant that can detect and deal with it safely.
However, usually the idea is to produce something entirely different, and do so efficiently. Those sorts of questions are quantitative, and that’s where things can and will go wrong all the time. Like, how do you ensure that your expensive catalyst isn’t covered in goo, or corrosion doesn’t eat your fancy impeller? How do you ensure that the amount of impurities in the product will remain reasonably low? It’s all about the quantities and reaction rates, and that’s the hard part with inorganic chemistry.
It’s also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.
I loved biology and statistics, and was pretty neutral towards calculus, but for some reason, chemistry is incomprehensible to me (Physics too, but that’s because neither the teacher nor I knew how to use my Casio graphing calculator, so I tried to do all the math on paper and ended up wasting the whole class doing arithmetic instead of listening-I’ve thought about taking a basic physics course at a community college, but I don’t think even that would help with chemistry).
My sister’s a science teacher and was taking masters level organic chemistry classes while I was taking high school chemistry. At one point she showed me some of her coursework and I literally decided in that moment that I didn’t want to study biology badly enough to go through organic chemistry.
That sounds like she’s a really bad teacher, lol, but my strengths are definitely in different areas, so it’s also a fair insight.
Here a [Co4Zr2O(OnPr)10(acac)4] single-source precursor is deposited onto Al-doped SrTiO3 […]
what the…?!?
Statements dreamt up by the utterly deranged /s
They are playing us for fools
I suspect that the leftovers can be processed more easily. It would be nice of the article to talk about what residuals are left.
burn any hydrocarbon, you get hydrogen/water and C02.
That’s bad
from the article (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44286-026-00406-y) linked in the article:
Besides H2 evolution, the oxidation products from the photocatalytic reforming process were also analyzed using ion chromatography and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The major oxidation products detected after 22 h were formate and acetate (from pretreated cellulose), as well as glycolaldehyde (GAld) dimer and glycolate (from pretreated PET),
seems very resources intensive, and with specific reagents/chemicals.
incomplete combustion, likely some nasty nitrates in there.
We’ll just dump them in the ocean. Nothing bad has ever happened from just dumping things in the ocean.
The spray-coating method cuts the cost to produce the reactors significantly, which should make them easier to produce at scale. But the hydrogen right now is still too expensive. According to a press release, the researchers still need to improve the durability and efficiency of the reactors.
Not feasible yet though
like it has been for 10+years, they should stop trying with hydrogen. just stick to solar, wind, ,etc.
It was very nice to see some good news today. If this can go at scale, then it will solve a whole lot of problems.
It won’t. Stop using plastic?
Yes stop using plastic without being an unnecessary ass.
The hydrogen comes from plastic so it’s arguably not “clean” as it still comes from fossil fuels.
Bad news: over 90% of plastic with those recycle tags end up exported and burned to make electricity.
It’s also burnt to make cement. Or just burnt, in Spain “mysterious fires” in sorting/recycling plants that only affected the plastic trash were pretty common after China stopped importing ship containers filled with mixed and unrecyclable plastics. I don’t know what is going on now, blessed ignorance, fuck reality.
Better than letting the plastic pile up.
But the C doesn’t disappear.
According to the original paper, the C goes into “value-added organics such as formate, acetate, glycolate and glycolaldehyde dimer.”
So specifically not carbon dioxide, which is the problem gas.
It’s still in the world, instead of in a hole in the ground, and will go CO² the next opportunity.
This is the problem with oil; no matter what steps you do inbetween (be it fuel or plastic, or recycling/processing the plastic), it will still accelerate climate warming in the end.
Oh noes not the C!
What is “the C”? In this context
Carbon. The stuff that prefers to be in a gaseous & bound form to do heat house effect, which we take out of the ground where it got to in times with significant warmer global climate.
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It’s pure plastic waste at that point. No one is going to be making plastic bottles for the purpose of dissembling them into hydrogen fuel anymore than they are currently making plastic bottles for the purpose of sending to waste-to-energy plants (incinerators).
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It’s not just plastic. It’s plants too; ideally agricultural and industrial byproducts.
Solar reforming has emerged as a class of sunlight-driven technologies capable of converting waste-derived substrates into fuels and chemicals. By utilizing substrates such as glucose or ethylene glycol (EG), derived from lignocellulosic biomass or polyethylene terephthalate (PET), as electron donors, solar reforming enables a more energetically favorable oxidation pathway compared with water oxidation.
- source: the paper linked in the article (emphasis mine)
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Agreed but at least if this is scalable, it is a solution to one problem.
