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."
Carbon Neutral* excluding waste streams (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Carbon Fixation (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Redundent.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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].