Stop the plastic bags, they are destroying the planet. A research group from Purdue University (USA), Universidad Tecnológica de Querétaro (Mexico) and Centro de Ingeniería y Desarrollo Industrial (Mexico) have succeeded in using them to produce lithium batteries. A smart and economical way to recycle them to store clean energy
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
Stop the plastic bags, they are destroying the planet. A research group from Purdue University (USA), Universidad Tecnológica de Querétaro (Mexico) and Centro de Ingeniería y Desarrollo Industrial (Mexico) have succeeded in using them to produce lithium batteries. A smart and economical way to recycle them to store clean energy.
Plastic bags have been banned here for some time, but they remain a global scourge. In fact, it is estimated that only in 2010 (before the ban) were they placed on the market 98,6 billion plastic bags in the EU (not recyclable), which means that every European citizen has used 198, of which, presumably, very few have been reused and therefore ended up in our seas, remaining there intact even for hundreds of years.
On the other hand, clean energy technologies are increasingly aiming at efficient storage systems to be competitive and definitively defeat obsolete and highly polluting fossil energy sources.
So why not turning a problem into a great opportunity? In a new study, researchers have developed a method for converting plastic bags into carbon chips that could be used as anodes for Lithium-ion batteries, suitable for storing the energy produced by photovoltaic panels and for powering electric cars.
The technique consists in immersing the polyethylene plastic bags in sulfuric acid and then heating it until it touches (but does not reach) the melting temperature of the polyethylene. The treatment changes the chemical structure of the bags, so that the plastic can be heated to a much higher temperature without vaporizing into dangerous gases.
At this point, with a further heat treatment, pure carbon is obtained, useful for producing anodes for lithium-ion batteries, which have shown comparable results, in terms of performance, to those currently on the market, so the technique is very promising.
What's wrong? The high temperature treatment it is not considered the best in environmental terms, and could significantly reduce the economic gain obtained from energy storage, so many doubts still remain.
But we have to start somewhere.
The work was published in ACS Omega.
Read also:
- Goodbye to plastic bags in all supermarket departments from 2018. But the organic ones will be paid
- 10 ideas from around the world to recycle plastic bags
- How to recycle lithium batteries… with mushrooms
