Image Source: Stock.Xchng. By: Juancho17.
There are 3 basic things that are generally considered bad in the green world: plastics, BPA in plastics, and excessive CO2 emissions. Imagine if some of these things could be combined and used for the greater good. It seems unlikely, right? Well, guess what? Scientists are currently working on this very thing and they are making progress.
Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have identified classes of organic chemicals that are capable of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and then be used to make BPA-free plastics. They discovered that “the coupling of epoxide with CO2 to form carbonates or polycarbonates is one of the most promising technologies in the utilization of CO2 and that metal catalysts combined with imidazolium salts can be used to promote such a reaction with significant advantages over conventional catalysts”.
So far, you have a plastic that is created from CO2 taken from the atmosphere and it’s also BPA-free, which means a serious reduction in environmental and health risks, but there is one other key point about this plastic that makes it different from others: it doesn’t use petroleum. Much of the plastic we use today has petroleum involved somewhere, but this latest research project completely eliminates that nasty ingredient from the picture. Imagine the impact all of this could have on Climate Change.
Check out this article to find out more.
By Heidi Marshall
