Two childhood friends spent a decade, beginning in college, figuring out how to cheaply make plastic from carbon that’s been captured from the atmosphere.
A decade ago in his Princeton dorm room, Mark Herrema had an aha moment. He read a newspaper story about the rise in heat-trapping methane emissions from dairy farms and decided to do something about it.
He thought — why not pull the carbon from the air and use it to make stuff? A politics major who also studied chemistry, he teamed up with childhood friend Kenton Kimmel,a biomedical engineering student at Northwestern University. They took odd jobs after graduation to fund their research.
“I was a bellhop and Kenton was a valet,” says Herrema, recalling how they worked 14 to 16 hours every day — even holidays — for years to pay their bills and test their ideas in rented lab space.
Industry experts told them it was a fool’s errand. For good reason. Scientists had spent decades trying to capture carbon and use it to make plastic but couldn’t do it cheaply enough. The two friends cracked the code by developing a ten-times more efficient bio-catalyst, which strips the carbon from a liquefied gas and rearranges it into a long chain plastic molecule.
The result? Today, the 31-year-old co-founders of California-based Newlight Technologies have two factories that take methane captured from dairy farms and use it to make AirCarbon — plastic that will soon appear in the form of chairs, food containers and automotive parts. Coming next year: cellphone cases for Virgin Mobile.
“You’ll be able to hold carbon in your hand,” Herrema says of the products, which an independent lab says remove more carbon from the atmosphere than their manufacturing emits. By replacing oil-based plastics, he says he wants to help reduce global warming: “We actually want to change the world.”
“This will be a paradigm shift in our industry,” says Dick Resch, CEO of furniture maker KI, saying AirCarbon will produce the first carbon-negative furniture. KI, which has backed Newlight for eight years and holds exclusive industry rights to its product, plans next year to sell AirCarbon chairs and eventually other products.
“I wish I had been smart enough to figure this out,” says William Dowd, former global director of industrial biotech research and development at Dow Chemical. He says venture capitalists asked him to look at Newlight’s work, but he initially demurred, doubting it would break ground. “I was astounded by what they were able to do.”
The Latest on: Plastic from carbon
[google_news title=”” keyword=”Plastic from carbon” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
via Google News
The Latest on: Plastic from carbon
- Taxi boat made from recycled plastic waste is ready to rideon April 24, 2024 at 7:31 pm
The recycled plastic water taxi was built out of 1.2 tonnes of HDPE plastic that was recovered by the community-centered programme, and would otherwise have been burnt, dumped or destined for the ...
- If plastic manufacturing goes up 10%, plastic pollution goes up 10% – and we’re set for a huge surge in productionon April 24, 2024 at 3:15 pm
The more plastic, the more waste we produce. It sounds simple, but this discovery could help us find ways of ending plastic pollution.
- Ottawa climate talks: can global plastic problem be solved?on April 24, 2024 at 5:41 am
Plastic production is an extraordinarily greenhouse gas-intensive process. The industry currently accounts for 5% of all global carbon emissions, according to a report published last week by the US ...
- Advanced Recycling Claims To Convert Dirty, Mixed Plastic Into Brand New Over and Over Againon April 24, 2024 at 4:40 am
If the current situation continues, by 2050, there will be 12 billion metric tons of plastic, which is 35,000 times as heavy as the Empire State Building. Therefore, advanced recycling takes a major ...
- Plastic pollution: three numbers that support a crackdownon April 23, 2024 at 5:00 pm
A new report from environmental-policy researcher Nihan Karali and her colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California concludes that plastic production generated the equivalent of 2 ...
- As plastic treaty talks open, countries more divided than everon April 23, 2024 at 11:29 am
Countries are under pressure to make progress on a first-ever global plastics treaty this week, but they face tense negotiations in the Canadian capital with parties deeply divided over what the ...
- Global plastic pollution treaty talks hit critical stage in Canadaon April 23, 2024 at 8:53 am
Thousands of negotiators and observers representing most of the world’s nations are gathering in the Canadian city of Ottawa this week to craft a treaty to end the rapidly escalating problem of plasti ...
- Global plastic treaty talks are happening. What do stakeholders want?on April 22, 2024 at 3:36 pm
Global leaders will gather in Canada's capital this week to discuss progress in drafting a first-ever global treaty to rein in soaring plastic pollution by the end of the year.
- Can plastics transform? What plastic-intensive industries can learn from leaders in the low carbon transition: Morningstar Sustainalyticson April 22, 2024 at 3:19 am
Adopting the right technology is a fundamental step for companies looking to lower their carbon outputs. Waste heat recovery and utilisation, and smart ...
- Plastic Is Starting to Generate a Staggering Proportion of Earth's Carbon Pollutionon April 20, 2024 at 4:00 am
The scientists found that even a conservative scenario — of the plastic sector growing at 2.5 percent per year — would result in a future in which greenhouse gas emissions from plastic production ...
via Bing News