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Science

Researchers Create Renewable Carbon Dioxide Sponge 206

First time accepted submitter Babu V Bassa writes "Concerned about adding too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? Consider a roof top coating on your car with this new material. A multinational team of researchers have developed a renewable sponge like material to capture and store gaseous carbon dioxide. The organic material is made up of gamma-cyclodextrin. Conventional metal-organic frameworks, which also are effective at adsorbing carbon dioxide, are usually prepared from materials derived from crude oil and often incorporate toxic heavy metals and are also non-renewable. The research paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society claims that its synthesis is essentially carbon-neutral and have the demonstrated ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere makes them promising materials for carbon fixation."
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Researchers Create Renewable Carbon Dioxide Sponge

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  • Redundent.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Sunday September 25, 2011 @01:38PM (#37509134)
    Wood already works for "carbon fixation" and you can make things with it that people will actually keep. My mother has some "fixated carbon" in the living room over 100 years old. Just grow a tree and make a desk.
    • Wood already works for "carbon fixation" and you can make things with it that people will actually keep. My mother has some "fixated carbon" in the living room over 100 years old. Just grow a tree and make a desk.

      Why use a simple, cheap solution when you can pay so much more for a complicated and less-effective one? The eco-industrial complex can't charge you as much for just growing a tree.

      • Re:Redundent.. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday September 25, 2011 @03:09PM (#37509556) Journal

        Great, the "eco-industrial complex" and "Big Green."

        We thought the AGW Denialism Batshit Generator Engine was running at max power, but it was just warming up...

        • Yeah, it's not so much "big green" as it is, GE, which owns NBC Universal, you know....

        • While I am a supporter of eco-preservation and green tech, I have to agree that there is an entire industry sector out there who is eager as hell to turn saving the ecosystem into a goose laying golden eggs. While I know, of course, that planting trees, while technically a solution, isn't really a solution because people aren't going to give up urban environments any time soon (which is exactly where we need the most carbon fixing), the point is valid...there started being an eco-industrial complex the mome

          • But isn't that what entrepreneurs do? Take advantage of opportunities to make a profit. I thought that was what our capitalist system was all about. Are you suggesting that green tech and renewable energy should be non-profit?

          • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

            How about this. There is no fucking way they are making me pay for the air I breath, you have a to draw a line somewhere and the line is drawn right fucking there.

            I am not paying to clean up pollution so that corporations can continue to pollute beyond all reason. I am not paying so that corporations can inflate their profit margins by dumping pollution rather than properly containing on pollutants on site. What ever methods they use recycling, fixation or simply rely on clean production, it should be th

      • What's the "eco-industrial complex"? You Teabaggers used to just call them "tree-huggers". You know - the people who urged you to plant and cultivate trees.

        You Teabaggers will say anything to imagine you're punching a hippie. Even if it chokes you to death.

    • Re:Redundent.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by NewWorldDan ( 899800 ) <dan@gen-tracker.com> on Sunday September 25, 2011 @01:51PM (#37509218) Homepage Journal

      To be fair, though, unless stored properly in a dry environment, wood will decay and release the carbon. If you want to store it forever, you need to bake it down into charcoal. Then you can bury it in the ground. Where it can later be dug up to fuel a power plant.

      In any event, I don't know who is supporting research for this retarded carbon dioxide sponge, but it needs to stop. There are so many more important things that could be done with that time and money. Feeding the poor, curing diseases, providing me with high end hookers and a pile of coke the size of Rhode Island. You get the idea.

      • Re:Redundent.. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by budgenator ( 254554 ) on Sunday September 25, 2011 @05:49PM (#37510350) Journal

        What you want to do to sequester CO2 is to make Terra Perta [wikipedia.org] by using the wood as a carbon source for low temperature pyrolysis called Biochar [motherearthnews.com].

      • Feeding the poor, curing diseases... oh the irony. Don't all these environmental problems boil down to big the existential question "are there too damn many people"?

        Save people - have fewer people. Which is it?
    • by macraig ( 621737 )

      Growing trees to carbon-fixated fruition takes patience! Who has that? You? What, are you a ritalin-and-prozac junkie or something?

    • Carbon Fixation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hanzie ( 16075 ) * on Sunday September 25, 2011 @02:04PM (#37509258)

      A way to fix carbon permanently is to bury it underground in a specially capped storage facility. Just so long as it doesn't decay, and just acts like a rock under the dirt, we're doing good.

      I call the above 'burying paper in a landfill'. Al Gore has an old newspaper he keeps on his desk that was perfectly preserved in a landfill.

      So we take trees, that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, turn them into paper to sell and finance the operation. Collect the paper and "carbon sequester" it underground in a capped storage facility (landfill). We're saving the planet!

      Given the above, the worst thing you can do is recycle paper.
      The more recycled, the less new produced.
      The less new paper produced, the fewer Douglas Fir trees planted in the managed forests.
      The fewer new trees planted, the less CO2 pulled from the atmosphere.

      Someone with more environmental awareness please show me where the logic is flawed. I'm unable to find it, and I've looked.

      • by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Sunday September 25, 2011 @02:27PM (#37509360) Homepage Journal
        Ooh better yet, require companies to keep huge amounts of paper records indefinitely! Then you don't even have to pay for the landfill! I smell a revamp to the tax code coming!
        • Ooh better yet, require companies to keep huge amounts of paper records indefinitely! Then you don't even have to pay for the landfill! I smell a revamp to the tax code coming!

          OK. This actually explains a lot... Or at least it makes more sense than most government initiatives.

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Stop recycling paper. I love suggesting it because people snap to the judgement that not recycling MUST be a bad thing. To be fair, I'm not positive not recycling would be a net carbon sequestration scheme, but it's certainly possible.

          In the first world forestry companies usually plant MORE trees than they harvest, so at least 100% of the harvested trees get replaced. The paper products are basically sheets of sequestered carbon. Bury them deep enough and they'll stay that way, until they get turned int

          • "Bury them deep enough and they'll stay that way, until they get turned into coal."

            Then we can burn it as fuel!!!

      • Re:Carbon Fixation (Score:4, Insightful)

        by a_n_d_e_r_s ( 136412 ) on Sunday September 25, 2011 @02:31PM (#37509386) Homepage Journal

        The energy needed to make paper from trees are larger then the energy needed by reusing old paper so that process will create alot more CO2.

        The owner of the land will plant new trees independently if paper are recycled or not. There are other uses of trees then for paper and the need for paper is increasing in this computerised world since many 'cant read' from the screen and insist of printing it into paper.

        • Re:Carbon Fixation (Score:4, Interesting)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Sunday September 25, 2011 @03:24PM (#37509636)

          Nobody reuses paper. They recycle it. And that's a whole other ballgame. Wikipedia says recycling paper actually uses MORE fossil fuels than producing new pulp because new pulp mills get energy mostly from burning wood scraps while recycling plants usually use electricity, which tends to be produced from fossil fuels, particularly in the urban areas where you want your recycling plant.

          No, if you don't use paper less trees get planted. Paper is a major consumer of forestry products and most of it in the first world comes from managed forests - they're harvested then replanted, just like farms. If they're not harvested, they don't get replanted.

          • by DamonHD ( 794830 )

            Nobody? Not ever, not one single sheet? Not like how I use almost all the paper that comes to my house for notes, or the kids to draw, etc, on *before* recycling it or using in the compost heap?

            OK, clearly I must be imagining using my paper 2 or 3 times typically. And printing almost nothing out of my own.

            Rgds

            Damon

            • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Little pedantic hey?

              Okay, the MAJORITY of paper reuse/recycling is recycling. Happy?

              • by DamonHD ( 794830 )

                Um, you're posting in /. where precision is a good thing. You must be new here! B^> Your initial statement was palpably false and silly; your new one is fine (though I may still not agree with it).

                Rgds

                Damon

      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        Simple. It costs more energy to recycle paper than it does to grow new trees for the use in wood and paper products. To recycle you need to, bleach, skim, decontaminate, treat, mash, mix, repulp, then make new. Plus using waste paper as mulching and mixed with other biomaterials works wonders. I mean those of us who live in the north have been doing this for nearly a 100 years, more so when there isn't any damn topsoil.

        • Not necessarily. If you didn't recycle then you would have to take up more land with trees, displacing marginal crop lands. Other farmers would have to increase energy inputs (fuel and fertilizer) in order to maintain the same crop yields. This is why we have market mechanisms, so people can judge weather they are being efficient with the resources they have.
        • You are wrong. Cutting and processing trees into paper costs lots more energy, typically made by burning the tree "waste" into the atmosphere, than does recycling paper (which uses electricity, which usually produces less pollution than that).

          You who live in the North lost your topsoil 100 years ago when you clearcut your forests. And you're still lying about the damage you're doing.

      • by no-body ( 127863 )
        Just the same BS as "permanent" storage of nuclear waste - only difference that CO2 sequestered storage does not radiate.

        Who the hell knows who will be the surprised recipient of all that crap in 10k years?
      • The problem is that much of the paper is not produced from plantation wood, but from old growth forests.

        After a quick google...
        Woodchipping in Australia [wikipedia.org]
        Ethical Paper [ethicalpaper.com.au]

    • Sounds good to me. All we have to do is get everyone on the planet to plant several tons of trees every year (30 billion tons CO2 emissions per year / 7 billion people). Should be easy!
      • by icebike ( 68054 )

        It is easy.

        You just stay home, and the trees will take care of planting themselves.

        Print this out and tape it to your wall. It will sequester the carbon, and remind you that earth will take care of itself.

      • If you planted some trees every year, they'd accumulate. So after 10 years the trees you'd planted would be sequestering 10x the carbon of a single year's planting. And of course the sapling/seed you plant weighs only a tiny percentage of the CO2 it sequesters when it's 20-50 years old.

        And then there's these machines and organizations that specialize in things. They can plant 100x the amount a single person would have to, so only 1% of the people have to plant any.

        Oh, and we could also stop burning as much

    • Re:Redundent.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by blueg3 ( 192743 ) on Sunday September 25, 2011 @02:15PM (#37509310)

      Wood already works for "carbon fixation" and you can make things with it that people will actually keep. My mother has some "fixated carbon" in the living room over 100 years old. Just grow a tree and make a desk.

      Apparently the IPCC agrees with you, even. However, relying on wood as a sole means of carbon sequestration requires [wikipedia.org] planting far more trees than we can reasonably dedicate land to.

      Planting trees to counteract CO2 emissions is cheap and effective, but it's not enough. We already know how to do it, so you're probably not going to see any news about new advances in tree-planting technology on Slashdot.

    • Even in the perverse world of the USPTO you could not get away with patenting the tree (yet). Therefore, trees simply cannot be the solution ;)

    • Nature has had a consistent carbon cycle for many millions of years. People came along and de-sequestered the carbon by drilling for oil, coal, and gas and then burning it. I wonder how much fossil fuel it will take to make this "organic material made up of gamma-cyclodextrin", esp. given how natgas is used in making fertiliser and oil is used in making pesticides.

      Trees do the job well, and they are extremely useful.

      I do not understand why you were rated offtopic - I think you're right on the nose.

      • I do not understand why you were rated offtopic - I think you're right on the nose.

        Because we do not have a "-1 I do not agree with you" moderation. I am used to it...

    • Bamboo is better. If you could plant the entire globe (including water, so you can't, but bear with me) with bamboo you'd fix all the excess carbon out of the atmosphere in one growth cycle. You can't do that, but we do have absolute shitloads of land that could sustain bamboo, which can be used for all of the same stuff we use wood for now. Sure, a lot of designs look really different when built with bamboo as compared to wood, but since you can literally use it as the core structure for skyscrapers I thin

  • Does this have any sort of implications for our current/future space efforts? I guess there might also be some implications for submarines? though I assume most submarines would just surface and pop their top. Then again maybe it would matter for stealth subs or perhaps extreme depth missions? I can't for the life of me find any point for using this in atmospheric conditions, I mean we have trees and plenty of other stuff dealing with carbon dioxide and such.
  • by sl4shd0rk ( 755837 ) on Sunday September 25, 2011 @02:44PM (#37509434)

    its 20 times worse than c02in regards to global warming.

  • by esten ( 1024885 ) on Sunday September 25, 2011 @03:14PM (#37509580)

    I always love how processes that claim to be carbon neutral exclude the largest sources of waste such as reagents and solvents used in processing which are in excess to 1000x the product achieved.

    And yes while some of these can be recovered somewhat on an industrial scale their recovery is highly energy intensive process.

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