> I found an interesting paper about turning plastics into syngas. (Syngas is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen that's useful for lots of things, including making various kinds of fuel, or even feeding to bacteria to make protein for food.)
> Their method works at normal pressure and temperature, in a reaction driven by sunlight. They made these special metal sheets that you can put in water with microplastics. Over a couple days, most of the plastic disappears. They tested PE plastic bags, PP plastic boxes and PET plastic bottles.
> And the way they made the sheets was basically "stir together these three chemicals you can buy online, heat, centrifuge, wash, and dry". It sounds maybe simple enough to try at home. Seems like a fun material to play with if the ingredients aren't too unsafe (I haven't checked safety yet).
> So I looked at how much actually buying those chemicals costs. It came to something like US$3,000 for the amount they made, which was less than a gram. Which no longer sounds quite so straightforward to try at home. I guess it's a catalyst, so it's not consumed by the reaction, but that's still a big investment as DIY projects go.
> Still a neat paper, though
rini17•5mo ago
There are so many possibilities. Even without any catalysts, just mix plastics with NaOH+KOH, melt it up and you can get benzene and other advanced chemicals not only syngas. Wonder why such ideas apparently never come to scale.
bell-cot•5mo ago
I'd ask an old chemical engineer about that. In general, "it'd be easy to scale up process X" is very different from "we would not lose $millions every week if we did that". And every "valuable" product of your reaction has to be separated, purified, packaged, sold, & shipped. Into a market with its own supply-demand price curve.
rini17•5mo ago
I think the engineer would just shrug "making stuff from oil is cheaper than everything else".
ColinWright•5mo ago
https://mathstodon.xyz/@jamey@toot.cat/115162618544000037
That post says:
> I found an interesting paper about turning plastics into syngas. (Syngas is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen that's useful for lots of things, including making various kinds of fuel, or even feeding to bacteria to make protein for food.)
> Their method works at normal pressure and temperature, in a reaction driven by sunlight. They made these special metal sheets that you can put in water with microplastics. Over a couple days, most of the plastic disappears. They tested PE plastic bags, PP plastic boxes and PET plastic bottles.
> And the way they made the sheets was basically "stir together these three chemicals you can buy online, heat, centrifuge, wash, and dry". It sounds maybe simple enough to try at home. Seems like a fun material to play with if the ingredients aren't too unsafe (I haven't checked safety yet).
> So I looked at how much actually buying those chemicals costs. It came to something like US$3,000 for the amount they made, which was less than a gram. Which no longer sounds quite so straightforward to try at home. I guess it's a catalyst, so it's not consumed by the reaction, but that's still a big investment as DIY projects go.
> Still a neat paper, though