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dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind
... 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?
The paper refers to the by products as “value added” and lists by products : “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), respectively“
Later mentioning no detectable CO2 was produced when they analyzed it.
So at least it doesn’t seem to be the worst thing considering we burn a lot of plastics and waste today.
We could ALSO stop producing and using so much damn plastic. Just sayin'.
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.
That problem is actually just billionaires even existing but blamed on the little guy
We could recycle bottle plastic instead of burning it to make hydrogen. Take two steps back an this is stupid.
"...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.
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
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.
I suspect that the leftovers can be processed more easily. It would be nice of the article to talk about what residuals are left.
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.
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.