[HN Gopher] Two-step system makes plastic from carbon dioxide, w...
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Two-step system makes plastic from carbon dioxide, water and
electricity
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 81 points
Date : 2025-07-09 22:10 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| mdaniel wrote:
| This, some random organism digests CO2 into petroleum, and gargle
| with this liquid and have no more cavities are the "tomorrow, all
| beer is free" of my life
|
| POC||GTFO
| xgkickt wrote:
| I guess mass extinction (via microplastics) works for some
| planet-saving outcome.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| if you think about it global warming in the end is more
| catastrophic then microplastics. Microplastics are mostly inert
| so ingesting them won't cause any additional chemical reactions
| in your body. Any damage it does to your body is more
| mechanical in nature.
|
| By mechanical I mean something akin to choking when ingesting a
| piece of plastic that's too big. Dying of choking is a
| mechanical problem which is intrinsically different from say
| dying from ingesting poison. Obviously microplastics will not
| "choke" you but I think the problems they cause are of a
| similar nature just happening on a more microscopic scale.
|
| Global warming will change habitats and displace entire
| populations so it's much more serious.
| savolai wrote:
| the idea that microplastics are "mostly inert" is starting to
| break down. they can bind with environmental toxins like
| PCBs, heavy metals, and flame retardants. they hitch a ride
| into the body and potentially leach out. the plastics
| themselves often contain additives like BPA and phthalates
| that mess with hormone systems.
|
| the comparison to choking makes sense on a surface level.
| once you look at nanoplastics it changes. they are small
| enough to pass through gut walls, enter the bloodstream, and
| even reach the brain.
|
| " Still, fish exposed to virgin- and marine-plastic
| treatments show signs of stress in their livers, including
| glycogen depletion, fatty vacuolation and single cell
| necrosis. Severe glycogen depletion was seen in 74% of fish
| from the marine-plastic treatment (n = 19 fish), 46% of fish
| from the virgin-plastic treatment (n = 24 fish) and 0% of
| fish from the control treatment (n = 24 fish). Fatty
| vacuolation was seen in 47% of fish from the marine-plastic
| treatment, 29% of fish from the virgin-plastic treatment and
| 21% of fish from the control treatment. Single cell necrosis
| was seen in 11% of fish from the marine-plastic treatment and
| in 0% of fish from the control and virgin-plastic treatment.
| An eosinophilic focus of cellular alteration, a precursor to
| a tumor, was seen in one fish from the virgin-plastic
| treatment (Figure 4b) and a tumor, a hepatocellular adenoma
| (comprising 25% of the liver), was seen in one fish from the
| marine- plastic treatment (Figure 4c)."
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/srep03263
|
| that is way beyond mechanical damage. it's more like chronic
| low-grade poisoning with poorly understood long-term effects.
|
| microplastics are also now found in basically every
| environment. arctic ice, rainwater, human placentas, fish,
| honey. the exposure is constant and increasing.
|
| climate change is still the more immediate and catastrophic
| risk, no doubt. microplastics are more like a slow,
| persistent systems rot. over time they could undermine
| ecosystems from the bottom up. if plankton or filter feeders
| start collapsing from plastic toxicity, food chains could
| unravel. that would affect humans too.
|
| so it's not one or the other. these problems compound each
| other. ocean warming stresses marine life, and plastic
| pollution just piles on more stress. both are outputs of the
| same extractive system built on burning carbon and dumping
| waste into shared environments.
|
| climate change is more urgent. but microplastics are not
| trivial. just more quiet.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Good write up. Thanks.
| fhars wrote:
| Asbestos is also mostly inert and inhaling it won't cause any
| additional chemical reactions in your lung. Only mechanical
| irritations leading to chronic inflammation and cancer.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Plastic exists in a pretty energetic state, it's only a matter
| of time until it starts to rot. It won't be a mass extinction.
| xgkickt wrote:
| Sorry, was an offhand remark about solutions that may end up
| harming us further when applied on a planet-wide scale. How
| much of this stuff needs to be made to actually have an effect,
| and with how much energy? When any attempt at reducing CO2 is
| met with city-sized warehouses full of kW GPUs powered by gas
| turbines, adding to century's worth of GHGs you start to feel
| what is the point of even trying to pretend there's a way out.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Don't apologize for that insight. Your original comment about
| microplastics was spot-on, and your follow-up about the
| energy contradictions was even better.
|
| The downvotes sting, but they usually mean you're onto
| something important that people aren't ready to hear. Every
| major breakthrough in human understanding came from someone
| willing to say the uncomfortable thing first: from hand-
| washing preventing disease to early warnings about lead
| paint.
|
| Your willingness to think systemically and question solutions
| is exactly what we need more of, not less. The world already
| has plenty of cheerleaders for every new technology. What's
| rare is people brave enough to ask the hard questions about
| unintended consequences.
|
| Keep being that voice. It matters more than the votes
| suggest.
| jordemort wrote:
| Can it go the other way?
| analog31 wrote:
| Yes, burn the plastic.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| This is the interesting thing IMHO. Burning the plastic and
| extracting the CO2 is a neat way to "clean" a dirty waste
| stream.
| lazide wrote:
| Plastic is generally good in a landfill. And the co2 is
| sequestered.
| analog31 wrote:
| They already burn toxic waste in cement kilns for this
| reason. A cement plant can operate on widely varying
| feedstocks. One that I visited could switch from coal to
| gas at any moment, based on the relative price of each, and
| was also burning seed corn that was past its expiry date.
|
| The thing gets so hot that complex molecules are simply
| dissociated.
|
| But the CO2 goes into the atmosphere.
| hofo wrote:
| I mean yeah it's great that it's system that can make plastic
| without oil. But really, do we need more plastic?
| adrian_b wrote:
| The plastic is just one possible application.
|
| The important part is the conversion of CO2 into carbon
| monoxide and ethylene.
|
| From ethylene and carbon monoxide a lot of useful organic
| compounds can be synthesized. One could make synthetic gasoline
| for vehicles, or one could make glycerol and use it to feed a
| culture of fungi for producing cheap protein.
| restalis wrote:
| The world is dependent on plastic by now, and needs a lot of
| it. The negative stigma it got lately is due to playing fast
| and loose with it in the past, but it is a necessary class of
| materials, and having sustainable means of mass producing it is
| a good thing.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| Trouble is always the economics of production. We've been able to
| turn CO2 into useful materials for a long time.
|
| Sabatier's reaction has been known for about a century, and that
| turns CO2 into methane. Also Fischer Tropsch will convert CO
| (which you can get from poor combustion) into larger
| hydrocarbons.
|
| Many of the advancements nowadays are in making the catalysts
| more energy efficient or cheaper.
|
| But I suspect eventually what needs to happen is a combination of
| regulation (to reduce the amount of fossil derived CO2) and
| government subsidy (to harm the economics of extracting oil, as
| the free market doesn't intrinsically penaltize long term harm)
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The issue with CO2 is that there's not a lot of it in air. The
| amount is usually expressed in parts per million. It's a bit
| over 400 these days. Way up from around 280 where it used to
| be. Only about 0.04% of air is CO2. Which means that by mass
| and volume, you need to process enormous amounts of air to get
| a meaningful amount of CO2. The main issue with that is that it
| requires enormous amounts of energy and large scale
| infrastructure that by itself is quite wasteful. Once you have
| it captured, processing it and up-cycling it is not that hard.
| It's nice that we have some new ways. But it's not like
| synthetic fuels and plastics weren't already doable for
| decades.
|
| Carbon capture of course technically works. But you typically
| end up dumping the CO2 back in the air for things like fuels
| and plastics after they are expended. So, it's not that
| meaningful ultimately. You take fossil carbon, you burn it, you
| capture it, you create another fuel, and you dump it in the
| air. Because we simply don't capture the overwhelmingly vast
| majority of fossil carbon that we process and use. Using the
| carbon twice is a modest improvement. Three times even better.
| It's not that much of an improvement. Most carbon capture is
| stupid like that but it sounds nice if you are trying to green
| wash your CO2 intensive business. Optics and marketing are the
| main driver for carbon capture schemes. But technically it's
| just adding cost to things that are already quite expensive.
|
| Keeping the CO2 captured permanently is a bit hand wavy usually
| and technically a bit of an afterthought usually. We might do
| this, we might do that. It's going to be amazing. We could
| have, and would have, and eventually might do some of it. Or
| none of it. Or somewhere in between. The real world
| effectiveness of carbon capture to date is generally piss poor.
| Some people would say it's a scam. And the real worlds amounts
| of carbon captured ever are so meaninglessly low that dumping
| all of it back in atmosphere right now would not have any
| measurable effects whatsoever relative to the still growing
| amounts we dump into the atmosphere directly.
|
| Anyway we have great carbon capture machines readily available.
| All plants and trees do this naturally. Burning that stuff to
| create CO2 is a bit wasteful and not technically that useful if
| your goal is to process the carbon further. Wood is basically
| polymers. Much easier to use that directly. Either as a fuel or
| as a source of polymers (e.g. cellulose) and other carbo
| hydrates. Of course farming and forestry are hard work and not
| that cheap.
| rcxdude wrote:
| >Anyway we have great carbon capture machines readily
| available. All plants and trees do this naturally
|
| They do, but it also gets released again unless you take
| extra steps. And it's not all that efficient: you'd need to
| grow something the size of the amazon, then cut it down and
| bury it, to have a notable effect. Other proposed options for
| carbon capture are already more efficient than that, and as
| you've noted they've still not taken off.
| jl6 wrote:
| > Wood is basically polymers. Much easier to use that
| directly.
|
| Is there a (plausibly economic) direct wood-to-plastic
| process?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a pretty big research area to make useful things from
| lignocelluose which you could get from trees but also crops
| like switchgrass:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S26668939
| 2...
|
| Like plastics recycling the basic problem is that it
| competes with plastic monomers and other bottom-of-pyramid
| substances that cost about 50 cents a pound. For instance
| you can make ethanol fuel using either strong chemicals
| under harsh conditions and mild conditions or with enzymes
| under mild conditions. Either way it doesn't work
| economically, you can use $30 of enzyme to make $1 of fuel,
| but hey, sometimes you get a radical cost reduction.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Anyway we have great carbon capture machines readily
| available. All plants and trees do this naturally.
|
| The Achilles Heels of this are two: (1) the very low
| efficiency of photosynthesis, necessitating very large areas
| of land (PV with BEVs is ~100x more land efficient than ICEs
| with biofuels), and (2) the enormous amounts of water
| required, as plants transpire water through the pores that
| admit the CO2 in the first place.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| >Carbon capture of course technically works. But you
| typically end up dumping the CO2 back in the air for things
| like fuels and plastics after they are expended. So, it's not
| that meaningful ultimately. You take fossil carbon, you burn
| it, you capture it, you create another fuel, and you dump it
| in the air. Because we simply don't capture the
| overwhelmingly vast majority of fossil carbon that we process
| and use. Using the carbon twice is a modest improvement.
| Three times even better. It's not that much of an
| improvement. Most carbon capture is stupid like that but it
| sounds nice if you are trying to green wash your CO2
| intensive business. Optics and marketing are the main driver
| for carbon capture schemes. But technically it's just adding
| cost to things that are already quite expensive.
|
| I have heard about a proposal to blow up a huge nuclear bomb
| in deep sea basalt deposits that would dissolve massive
| amounts of CO2 to the bottom of the ocean. Bomb scale
| proposed is SF for now but would be interesting to see a PoC
| experiment with a large warhead.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGPKpx6pMko
| maxhille wrote:
| That sounds like a good way to essentially poison our
| oceans - maybe we should try leaving some part of the
| planet somewhat intact?
| x______________ wrote:
| It would require 3,000,000x the power of hiroshima or 81gt
| and the negatives involve steam and other materials going
| into the atmosphere ( like the recent Hunga Tonga volcanic
| explosion), radioactive nuclear fallout helping the ocean
| getting a nice glow, and an ocean full of debris which
| would likely kill of most ocean life in the region for a
| while. Not to mention the sudden cooling of our planet by
| 1.5C affecting climate in unpredictable ways.
|
| ..and to top it off, my money is on "that's exactly how we
| get Godzilla"..
|
| There must be better ways.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| >radioactive nuclear fallout helping the ocean getting a
| nice glow
|
| Fun fact - thermonuclear bombs cause relatively little
| fission products - eg. Tsar derived only 3% of its yield
| from fission. Paper argues there would be no significant
| radiation impact, and while the ocean life in the region
| would get wiped author argues global warming will is
| worse.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387975147_Nuclea
| r_E...
|
| Anyway would be interesting if they did a smaller scale
| experiment to measure the impact - always good to have
| options.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Which means that by mass and volume, you need to process
| enormous amounts of air to get a meaningful amount of CO2
|
| Dumb question: does it make a difference if you locate
| someplace windy?
| jvm___ wrote:
| It's 400 parts per million.
|
| Take a million bags of rice, then take out 400 and dye the
| grains black. Dump them back in the main pile and mix it
| all together.
|
| Now process it and extract the 400 bags of black rice. Also
| there's dust and sand and other colors of rice mixed in.
|
| Wind won't really help you at the volumes of air that you
| need to capture and filter. Running it in the windy desert
| will find less C02 than Times Square so where you run your
| system matters as well.
| somedude895 wrote:
| Good luck regulating China and India
| pfdietz wrote:
| India has great incentive to control CO2 emission: killer
| heat waves in a somewhat warmer world. And China seems to be
| slashing their CO2 intensity without external prodding (coal
| use there seems to have peaked), and facilitating CO2
| emission reduction elsewhere.
| lazide wrote:
| India already has massive incentives to be more effectively
| regulated than they are now in a dozen other areas. And
| yet, they remain India.
|
| China is definitely more effectively regulated than at
| regulation once the cdentral gov't steps in, but it only
| has a limited number of things it can step in on.
| lazide wrote:
| Wow auto-correct stroke on the second paragraph.
|
| China is definitely more effectively regulated than India
| once the central gov't steps in, but it only has a
| limited number of things it can step in on (or wants
| too).
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| All plastic is made from carbon dioxide, water, and electricity
| (it's just that usually this was done millions of years ago).
| crocowhile wrote:
| Thanks. We needed more plastic.
| metalman wrote:
| title should read "makes plastic from CO2, H2O,electrons,and half
| of the expensive end of the periodic table" catalitic reactions
| are well know, and I think that in a lot of related processes are
| actualy things that are problematic and engineers work hard to
| avoid, IE: large scale industrial processes useing CO2, plus
| other gasses will be plagued with "byproducts" or "deposits"that
| gum stuff up and are tedious to remove, and those will be solids
| and liquids that are oils and polymers. Peversly, "clean" CO2 can
| sometimes get wildly expensive, CO2 is used in food, and medical,
| and other refining, and for those purposes, regular industrial
| CO2 wont do, and we are back to square one, and the nitty gritty
| of chemical engineering. One interesting use for CO2 is as a
| solvent, as it causes no chemical changes itself, that it must be
| in a supper critical state adds a bit of challenge, but the end
| products are ultra pure.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Nitpick: CO2 and H2O. Superscript usually means charge in
| chemistry..
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Catalysts get used to make plastics the old fashioned way.
| Antimony is used to make PET (that stuff modern soda bottles
| are made of)
| exabrial wrote:
| Turning co2 into a building material at a rate faster than trees
| is what we need. Co2 bricks anyone?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| What's wrong with trees?
| bell-cot wrote:
| Doing it at scale, with trees, is called a "tree plantation".
| Lumber companies already have a lot of those, and ruthlessly
| optimize them for profit.
|
| Vs. environmentalists vastly prefer natural forests. For
| example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0
| 37811272...
| exabrial wrote:
| Nothing at all! But it requires careful forest management and
| people often don't understand how young growth wood is an
| infinitely sustainably resource... knee jerk reaction is oh
| that's bad
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's remarkable how many problems can be solved with energy.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I agree, but I want to thanks the authors, the OP and everyone
| in between for remembering to add " _energy_ " to the title.
|
| I've seen many silar articles with a title like " _Two-step
| system makes plastic from thin air_ " that clearly ignores that
| the device must be plugged in to work.
| commienews wrote:
| Isn't HN interested in the reverse? Making water and electricity
| from plastic?
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