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New Chemical Process Can Convert Nearly a Quarter of All Plastic Waste Into Fuel
"Researchers at Purdue University have developed a new chemical process that they say can convert approximately one-quarter of the world's plastic waste into gasoline and diesel-like fuels," writes Slashdot reader dmoberhaus. Motherboard explains how it works:
As detailed in a paper published this week in Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, the chemists discovered a way to convert polypropylene -- a type of plastic commonly used in toys, medical devices, and product packaging like potato chip bags -- into gasoline and diesel-like fuel. The researchers said that this fuel is pure enough to be used as blendstock, a main component of fuel used in motorized vehicles. Polypropylene waste accounts for just under a quarter of the estimated 5 billion tons of plastic that have amassed in the world's landfills in the last 50 years.
To turn polypropylene into fuel, the researchers used supercritical water, a phase of water that demonstrates characteristics of both a liquid and a gas depending on the pressure and temperature conditions. Purdue chemist Linda Wang and her colleagues heated water to between 716 and 932 degrees Fahrenheit at pressures approximately 2300 times greater than the atmospheric pressure at sea level. When purified polypropylene waste was added to the supercritical water, it was converted into oil within in a few hours, depending on the temperature. At around 850 degrees Fahrenheit, the conversion time was lowered to under an hour. The byproducts of this process include gasoline and diesel-like oils. According to the researchers, their conversion process could be used to convert roughly 90 percent of the world's polypropylene waste each year into fuel. |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| cauz |
Feb. 8, 2019, 10:42 p.m. |
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| Drew Gilpin Faust |
As a scholar, you don't want to repeat yourself, ever. You're supposed to say it once, publish it, and then it's published, and you don't say it again. If someone comes and gives a scholarly paper about something they've already published, that's just terrible. As a university president, you have to say the same thing over and over and over. |
| Tom T. Hall |
I have my own religion. I'm sort of one-quarter Baptist, one-quarter Catholic, one-quarter Jewish. |
| Peter Agre |
Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry. |
| Andy Warhol |
I love Los Angeles, and I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic. |
| Brad Garrett |
I'm the type of guy that feels pressure when I have to order dinner. I'm just that type of guy but that's my fuel. I work well with pressure. |
| Aleksey Igudesman |
We developed our own type of Igudesman and Joo electric violin, let's say, and funny enough, the shape of it was developed by the head technician of Steinway. It's actually an electric violin, which is made from the stick that holds up the piano lid. |
| Ted Danson |
You have to work with the auto industry, the oil companies, you have to work to develop renewable fuel, whether it's solar or different kinds of fuel or whatever. |
| Jason Isbell |
If you're somebody who writes songs or writes fiction, a writer that people pay for your opinion in any way, you shouldn't be the least bit uncomfortable giving it to them. People want songwriters to tell them how they think and how they feel. That's what a song is. That's what I want to hear in a song. |
| Richard Hammond |
It's not just the kid who's spent every penny from his job to upgrade his car to tell the world he cares about sports cars, it's also the person driving around in a fuel-conscious hybrid electric car, because it's more a message to the world than an effective means of saving fuel, to be quite honest. |
| Scott Adams |
Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel. |
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A caterpillar that munches on plastic bags could hold the key to tackling plastic pollution, scientists say.
Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered that the larvae of the moth, which eats wax in bee hives, can also degrade plastic.
Experiments show the insect can break down the chemical bonds of plastic in a similar way to digesting beeswax.
Each year, about 80 million tonnes of the plastic polyethylene are produced around the world.
The plastic is used to make shopping bags and food packaging, among other things, but it can take hundreds of years to decompose completely.
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Type A Blood Converted To Universal Donor Blood With Help From Bacterial Enzyme
For a transfusion to be successful, the patient and donor blood types must be compatible. Now, researchers analyzing bacteria in the human gut have discovered that microbes there produce two enzymes that can convert the common type A into a more universally accepted type. If the process pans out, blood specialists suggest it could revolutionize blood donation and transfusion. To up the supply of universal blood, scientists have tried transforming the second most common blood, type A, by removing its "A-defining" antigens. But they've met with limited success, as the known enzymes that can strip the red blood cell of the offending sugars aren't efficient enough to do the job economically.
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Scientists Discover a Game-Changing Way To Remove Salt From Water
[T]he ability to quickly and easily desalinate water has long been a goal of scientists around the world. And now, a group of researchers from Columbia University believe they've found a way to do it. The process is called Temperature Swing Solvent Extraction (TSSE) and it's designed to purify hypersaline brines (water that contains a high concentration of salts, making it up to seven times as salty as seawater). This kind of waste water is produced by industrial processes and during oil and gas production and it poses a major pollution risk to groundwater.
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my loan sites convert more in the middle of the week.
im guessing thats because paychecks come in at the end of the week
and at the beginning of the week, people havent run out of their money yet
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Self-Healing Material Can Build Itself From Carbon In the Air (mit.edu)
MIT chemical engineers have reportedly designed a material that can react with carbon dioxide from the air, "to grow, strengthen, and even repair itself." According to MIT News, "The polymer, which might someday be used as construction or repair material or for protective coatings, continuously converts the greenhouse gas into a carbon-based material that reinforces itself." From the report:
The current version of the new material is a synthetic gel-like substance that performs a chemical process similar to the way plants incorporate carbon dioxide from the air into their growing tissues. The material might, for exampl...
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Microplastics Found In 90 Percent of Table Salt (nationalgeographic.com)
New research shows microplastics in 90 percent of the table salt brands sampled worldwide. Of 39 salt brands tested, 36 had microplastics in them, according to a new analysis by researchers in South Korea and Greenpeace East Asia. Salt samples from 21 countries in Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia were analyzed. The three brands that did not contain microplastics are from Taiwan (refined sea salt), China (refined rock salt), and France (unrefined sea salt produced by solar evaporation). The study was published this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
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AI Plus a Chemistry Robot Finds All the Reactions That Will Work
A team of researchers at Glasgow University have built a robot that uses machine learning to run and analyze its own chemical reaction. The system is able to figure out every reaction that's possible from a given set of starting materials. Ars Technica reports:
Most of its parts are dispersed through a fume hood, which ensures safe ventilation of any products that somehow escape the system. The upper right is a collection of tanks containing starting materials and pumps that send them into one of six reaction chambers, which can be operated in parallel. The outcomes of these reactions can then be sent on for analysis. Pumps ...
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Scientists Have 'Hacked Photosynthesis' To Boost Crop Growth By 40 Percent (npr.org)
There's a big molecule, a protein, inside the leaves of most plants. It's called Rubisco, which is short for an actual chemical name that's very long and hard to remember. Rubisco has one job. It picks up carbon dioxide from the air, and it uses the carbon to make sugar molecules. It gets the energy to do this from the sun. This is photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight to make food, a foundation of life on Earth. "But it has what we like to call one fatal flaw," Amanda Cavanagh, a biologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, says. Unfortunately, Rubisco isn't picky enough about what it grabs from the air. It also picks up oxygen. "When it does that, it makes a ...
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im tellin you (and myself) when btc hits 10k we're all going to be hating ourselves. I need to just take half of every paycheck and convert it. Im going to take it as a form of payment if I ever decide to start a business
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Engineers Say They've Created Way To Detect Weapons Using Wi-Fi
The researchers, which include engineers from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and Binghamton University, published a study this month detailing a method in which common wifi can be used to easily and efficiently identify weapons, bombs, and explosive chemicals in public spaces that don't typically have affordable screening options. The researchers' system uses channel state information (CSI) from run-of-the-mill wifi. It can first identify whether there are dangerous objects in baggage without having to physically rifle through it. It then determines what the material is and what the risk level is. The researchers tested the detection system using 15 different obje...
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