A New Recycling Method Can Turn CO2 into Diapers, Textiles, and More

There is a new catalyst in town, and it does a great job at transforming one of the worst offending greenhouse gases, CO2, into useful products, reports SINC. The impressive catalyst has been produced by a team of researchers from Canada and the U.S.

Water electrolyzer

“The technology of water electrolyzers is well known: They transform water and electricity into hydrogen and oxygen, but in our case, we add CO₂ to the cocktail and, instead of producing hydrogen, we can generate various hydrocarbons, such as ethylene, which is the most widely used organic compound worldwide,” researcher F. Pelayo García de Arquer, of the University of Toronto (Canada), told SINC.

“Thus, we can obtain raw materials for the manufacture of products such as construction materials, textiles, paints, electronic device components, diapers... or even spirits.”

The innovation builds on past research to produce a catalyst that can transform plenty of CO2 as opposed to past configurations, which only allowed for a bit of the gas to be transformed.

Limited no more

"About two years ago, CO₂ electrolysis systems were limited to electrical outputs or currents of tens of milliamps per square centimeter, meaning that only a few molecules of this gas can be transformed into something useful,” said the researcher.

This discovery allows the system to operate at currents 100 times stronger, which amounts to more than one ampere per sq cm. Thus allowing for more CO₂ molecules to be transformed.

Even better, adds the researcher, the source of electricity required for the process “can be perfectly renewable, such as solar, wind or hydraulic energy, so it is a way of building likewise renewable hydrocarbons.”

The team is now developing the efficiency and stability of the system to hopefully make it viable soon. Any product that can transform greenhouse gases is welcome in today's climate change impacted-world. We can't wait to see how this develops.