Raphael Thys
Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash
Humanity has created a monster. It is poisoning our oceans, destroying our wildlife and infiltrating our bodies. I am, of course, talking about plastic pollution. This miracle material has helped usher in our modern world, but it has cost the Earth, dearly. If we don’t do something to stop the flood of plastic we could soon face an ecological catastrophe. Incredibly, thanks to a revolutionary new technology, we can now use the plastic plague to fight climate change. But how? And will it be enough?
Before diving into this wonderful technology we first need to understand just how much plastic pollution there is. Overall there are around 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic waste globally! That includes the stuff in landfills and the 5.25 billion pieces of micro and macro plastics currently in our ocean. However, this number grows each year as we are producing over 400 million tonnes of plastic per year.
Humanity is drowning in plastic — Photo by Jordan Beltran on Unsplash
But this plastic doesn’t just sit about harmlessly. We have all seen the images of wildlife being literally strangled by plastic waste, but that isn’t their only deadly side. UV breaks down plastic into microscopic pieces. These can enter organisms’ cells clogging them up and leaching out toxic chemicals causing all sorts of illnesses and even death. What’s more, every corner of the globe has vast amounts of microplastic pollution and we can be sure almost every organism on the planet has some microplastic embedded inside them. Yes, that includes you.
We already see ecosystems struggle to cope with plastic pollution. This problem is only set to get worse. Soon we could see ecosystems collapse or even rapid deterioration of global human health all due to microplastics. Needles to say we need to put a stop to this as soon as possible.
We are already trying to capture and store plastics but the problem is there is no way to do this profitability. This makes it incredibly hard to scale-up to match the immense size of the problem. Thankfully that is all about to change.
Clean up our mess is hard to scale up — Photo by OCG Saving The Ocean on Unsplash
A team at Rice University has developed a way to use waste plastic to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s right, one catastrophic climate change causing compound is being used to tackle another catastrophic climate change causing chemical. Carbon capture is turning into a very valuable industry with a projected value of $7 billion by 2030. So, not only does this technology make plastic pollution useful, it also makes it profitable and therefore scaleable.
The technology is relatively simple. Take your plastic waste, grind it into a powder, mix it with potassium acetate and heat it up to 600 ºC (1,112 ºF) for 45 minutes. The potassium acetate reacts with the plastic power to turn it into absorbent particles filled with nanoscale pours holes. These holes are just the right size for carbon dioxide to get lodged in — and each particle can store around 18% of its mass in CO².
Image of the treated plastic showing the nanoscale pours — Rice University
Various plastics can be used for this process, even those that are very difficult to recycle like polypropylene and polyethylene. This means every piece of plastic waste can be used in this way.
So, what if we turned the entirety of our global plastic pollution and waste into these carbon-capturing particles? Could we feasibly do that? And would it make a difference?
Well, thanks to organizations like Ocean Clean Up and some revolutionary bacteria-based microplastic capture technology, we can extract plastic pollution from the ocean. As for plastic pollution on land we can use birch trees to capture microplastics in the soil (read my article on this technology here) and we already have giant mounds of waste plastics in landfills. So, it won’t be easy, but in theory, we have the technology to capture every piece of plastic pollution and waste, all 6.3 billion tonnes of the stuff.
Ocean Clean Up’s plastic capture technology — Ocean Clean Up
We would have to use zero-emissions vehicles and energy to power the capture and the refining process of the waste plastic otherwise there is little point to the operation. But with the advent of vessels like Ocean Bird, the widespread use of EVs, the development of new efficient nuclear reactors and high-power solar farms this shouldn’t be a problem.
If we pulled it off how much carbon could we capture? Well, around 1.134 billion tonnes, which sounds like a lot!
However, it still isn’t enough. We are currently producing around 35 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. Our hypothetical mega global plastic clean-up operation would, only capture 3.24% of a single year’s worth of humanity’s carbon footprint.
We produce a vast amount of carbon dioxide each year — Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash
This demonstrates the sheer size of our problem and why a single carbon capture technology can’t be a silver bullet.
However, all is not lost. We currently have a myriad of carbon capture and storage technology and each one has its positives and negatives. None of them can fight climate change on their own, but together, they give us a chance at reversing our self-made disaster.
So new cutting-edge technology can kill two birds with one stone. Rice University has enabled us to fight plastic pollution and climate change in one fell swoop by making plastic pollution a valuable carbon capture asset. Sure, it can’t single-handedly save the day, but it can definitely make the future a far brighter place.