Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Think of it as Storage...

In the future, all those DVDs you buy could be made from air pollution.

If plans to remove carbon dioxide from smokestacks succeed, the gas could be harnessed and turned into plastic products, new research claims.

Sucking the carbon dioxide from smokestack emissions could enable a process by which the heat-trapping gas would be turned into a raw material for making polycarbonates, a type of plastic, and keep it from raising global temperatures even more...

~snip~

Carbon dioxide is also cheaper and less toxic than other starting materials traditionally used to make plastics.

Polycarbonates, which are easily worked and molded, are used to make many transparent materials, including CDs and DVDs, eyeglasses and drinking bottles. Both teams are developing methods to transform carbon dioxide into the starting materials for polycarbonates and expect that people could be watching movies on waste-carbon dioxide DVDs sooner than they think.

"I would say it's a matter of a few years" before these waste-derived polymers are available to the public, Müller said.

If we thought of all the CO2 in the atmosphere as kind of being in a bank, and easily available to use, we'd be surprised by how fast we clean it out of the air

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24018793/

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