A Simple, Cheap Material For Carbon Capture, Perhaps From Tailpipes!

Using a type of polymer called melamine which is not that expensive, the main component of Formica, chemist scientists have created an easy and energy-efficient way which is also cheap to capture carbon dioxide from exhaust pipes! This is a key goal for the United States and other nations as they seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The process for obtaining the melamine material, which was published this week in the journal Science Advances, could be scaled down to capture emissions from vehicle exhaust and other sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Carbon Dioxide is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that is generated from burning fossil fuels!

This new material is actually very simple to make! This is made from shelf melamine powder. This costs about $40 per ton along with the acids which are being used. These acids are also used in chlorine in swimming pools.

Professor Jeffrey Reimer wanted to think of a carbon capture material that was really cheap and easy to get. So that is why the professor decided to start with melamine which is inexpensive. Jeffrey is a professor at the Graduate School in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the corresponding authors of the paper which I mentioned previously!

I hope that this plan works out and we could stop pollution and overheating to make our beloved earth a better place to live!

Author: Sri Nihal Tammana

Source: University of California – Berkeley