Researchers have created a device that uses just solar energy to convert greenhouse gases and plastic trash into sustainable fuels and other useful items.

The device was created by researchers from the University of Cambridge, and it is the first solar-powered reactor to be able to simultaneously transform two waste streams into two chemical products.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) and polymers are transformed in the reactor into a variety of products that are helpful in a variety of sectors. In experiments, CO2 was transformed into syngas, a crucial component of sustainable liquid fuels, and plastic bottles into glycolic acid, a substance used extensively in the cosmetics sector. By altering the catalyst utilized in the reactor, the system is easily tweaked to yield different products.

[removed]

How is turning plastic into fuel sustainable in any way?

This sort of "Carbon capture" is really ridiculous. We burn carbon for a very good reason - it releases lots of energy, producing CO2. If we want to reverse the process we have to put even more energy in.
SO if you have free energy about to do carbon capture you are MUCH better off just using that energy to do what ever you were burning the carbon for in the first place!

As to converting the plastic, you can do that without any additional energy input (it is after all basically oil!) Cf. "Quantafuel".

But it is a way to store engery that we already understand very well. And one we already have the necessary infrastucture for. It could for instance be used to Transport solar energy lossless from say the Sahara to Europa. Will it yield in the end? Who can say? I'm not saying it is the way forward but it could well be one pillar among many, possibly giving us oportunities we didn't have before

The following submission statement was provided by /u/landlord2213:

Researchers have created a device that uses just solar energy to convert greenhouse gases and plastic trash into sustainable fuels and other useful items.

The device was created by researchers from the University of Cambridge, and it is the first solar-powered reactor to be able to simultaneously transform two waste streams into two chemical products.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) and polymers are transformed in the reactor into a variety of products that are helpful in a variety of sectors. In experiments, CO2 was transformed into syngas, a crucial component of sustainable liquid fuels, and plastic bottles into glycolic acid, a substance used extensively in the cosmetics sector. By altering the catalyst utilized in the reactor, the system is easily tweaked to yield different products.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10zltkm/solarpowered_system_converts_plastic_and/j83nf9p/

Yeah but we might not have a choice about using direct air capture in the future

The crazy amount of plastic pollution is just criminal. If this device can reduce it I would be all for it.

Your argument has a point but we are not talking about just fuels. You are right in that the energy would be most efficiently used to avoid extraction of more fossil fuel but..

In this case we are reusing plastic produced from Oil rather than discarding it. We have a large stock of plastic that we have no use for. Do we bury it, burn it (releasing CO2) or can we reuse it?

Re using this as a substitute for fuels or plastic feedstocks that have no ready sustainable replacement reduces the net amount of carbon emitted. Ideally we would have substitutes for every application but we dont yet (Jet fuel being a good example but we also dont have good substitutes for many plastics either) so these provide more pathways for non-polluting energy to be added to the mix.

Maybe its bioplastic and this is a form of recycling but you could just burn it so idk

"Trees are to inefficient, lets replace them with solarpanels and make our own air"

[deleted]

The problem is that certain countrys just dont care

Sustainable fuel?? Plastic is literally made from petroleum, they’re just reconstituting it into something that will burn in an engine

In some cases, yeah. Can't plant a tree on a space station.

Certainly not with this attitude

[deleted]

[deleted]

Thrre is bioplastic

Lots of folks misunderstanding what technologies like this can do for us as a species.

At a fundamental level, climate change is driven by taking carbon from the ground and putting it in the air. Let's pull some numbers out of our ass and say 500 years ago there was 50 tons of carbon in the atmosphere and 400 tons in the ground (again, these numbers are way low and way simplified). As we moved through the industrial revolution we pulled coal, oil, and natural gas out of the earth and burned it; taking the carbon they stored underground and putting it in the atmosphere. Our numbers now look something like 150 tons of carbon in the atmosphere and 300 tons underground.

Even if tomorrow we suddenly stopped burning all fossil fuels forever and never put another atom of carbon in the air again these numbers wouldn't change and climate change would remain unsolved.

With a technology like these researches have come up with you create a cycle of carbon rather then a transfer. Reusing the same carbon atoms over and over again rather than pulling more out of the ground. You still haven't solved the fact that there's too much carbon in the atmosphere but what you can do is essentially de-carbonize the fossil fuel sector.

I get that sounds backwards, so let me explain: If you use gasoline in your car that originally started as oil in the ground you are taking carbon and putting it in the atmosphere, which we don't want. But if someone takes carbon from the atmosphere and mixes it up with reactors like this one then refines and cracks it into gasoline which you then burn, it's technically carbon neutral. You haven't pulled more out of the ground for your transportation, since all the carbon that you put into the air started out in the air.

This allows us to de-carbonize every sector still using fossil fuels without them needing to spend years we don't have developing and implementing greener versions of their own.

Now is it completely carbon neutral? No. But it's a helluva lot closer to it than our current setup.

In addition: it lets us tackle another part of the problem, all the extra carbon still in the atmosphere.

Oil as a substance is pretty good at being a dense carbon storage medium, it's not the best, but it does a damn good job. So the opportunity we have is to build these reactors at such a large scale that we overproduce. Making more oil than the world needs, we can then pump that excess back into the ground. Taking the carbon we originally took out of the ground and putting it back. Which takes the wheels off the climate change train in a big way.

I'll end by saying this is not the silver bullet solution to all our problems, like every other technology this is a tool, not the whole damn toolbox.

Anyone who tells you stuff like this means we can keep burning fossil fuels willy-nilly without a care in the world is wrong. The adverse health effects of oil, gas, and especially coal; are not something we can just dismiss.

But anyone who says this technology does not belong in our future because it involves creating and burning fossil fuels is missing the key role this can play in mitigating the worst of climate change and reducing humanities need for carbon that is still in the ground and needs to stay there.

Sorry for the wall of text, TL;DR: these technologies can be useful, if we use them correctly.

>SO if you have free energy about to do carbon capture you are MUCH better off just using that energy to do what ever you were burning the carbon for in the first place!

There are a variety of applications where being tethered to a grid or using a battery are not practical. Fuel is convenient because it has insane energy density and certain kinds of fuel can be kept for years without degrading. The amount of raw energy contained in a sizeable gas can would be too heavy for a human to carry if it were a battery. A $20 gas can with $4 of gas contains more energy than my $25,000 battery backup system, for example. And while extracting useful work from fuel is often inefficient, using the fuel for something like heating is practically 100% efficient.

Long story short, we will always have a use for fuel, so being able to sustainably produce it is useful.

As others have pointed out this idea isn't to create new energy, it's to get rid of garbage in a way that produces energy as a by product instead of producing different waste as a by product. At least that's how I'm reading it.

it's sustains the profit margins of some company.

[removed]

I’m gonna tell you, we’re absolutely going to plant a tree on a space station, just not yet

In a couple decades probably. If we can get space farming going then space forests would act as massive nature preserves. Just near term I think artifical scrubers would do better.

> This allows us to de-carbonize every sector still using fossil fuels without them needing to spend years we don't have developing and implementing greener versions of their own.

The big issue is the above last paragraph - it allows existing fossil fuel using industries to continue as before, and likely use a mix of a small amount of synth gas and a large amount of fossil fuel, and pretend they are solving the problem, instead of doing the hard work of moving to a new process which does not use fossil fuel at all

When talking about plastic, are they not the perfect carbon capture vehicle, since they don't decompose?

We need to turn plastic into a commodity so that it gets used up instead of thrown on the ground.

[removed]

But if the fuel is electricity + plastic + CO2 then it’s not sustainable because the plastic component is fossil fuel.

Isn’t the goal to mitigate climate change by reducing atmospheric CO2?

Climate IS SOLVED. STOP SPRAYING CHEMTRAILS AND THE WEATHER WILL NOT CHANGE. LET JOHN KERRY, ALGORE, & GATES LOOSE AND WE ARE SCREWED. JUST STOP THE LIE. Its not warming. ITS NOT WARMING. 1930S was the hottest decade on record. No other decade can match it. We ARE GETTING COOLER! But, lets act like all woke and feel good while these sicko elites steal everything in sight. IRS shakedown of poor people, Gates killing kids with vax. C19 jabs dropping ppl like fing flies! Yeah, they really give a flying fart about u greeny Vegans. They will eat you last. USEFUL IDIOTS!!

I think they're conflating multiple use cases. Fuel based on air-captured CO2 = carbon neutral (assuming the use of green energy). Fuel based on plastic sourced from fossil oil/gas = fossil fuels, just with an intermediate step. I agree that we will have a need for some form of fuel for a long while. But that doesn't make all fuel feedstocks equally sustainable. Burning more fossil fuels is bad.

Which would be best achieved by leaving that CO2 locked up in plastic in the landfill, not to convert the plastic back into fuel to be burnt.

Agree with your first assesment - e-fuels are pushed by big oil to keep the status quo up as long as possible.

Disagreeing on the last technicality though: leaving stuff on landfills tends to leak methane into the athmosphere, which sucks.

For food waste we should replace compost and landfills with biodigesters, so that the methane gets captured, burned for energy and thus gets double use and lower impact (if done enough it can replace a big part of nat gas consumption)

If they manage to digest plastic into something useful too, why not. But Unfortunately good things like these will be used to keep producing plastic, which is an entire problem in itself.

Plastic will not decompose to methane. And the reason not to convert it to something else is that that process will release its embedded co2 into the atmosphere.

Yes, the methane comed mostly from bio stuff. But plastic will degrade into smaller plastic, eventually getting into our drinking water. Already they found microplastics in the human bloodstream. We really need to get away from single use platics, plastic clothing and plastic fishing nets.

Not from a landfill it won’t.