To the Future ::Current Events::

I was reading through some Scientific America entries and I ran across this.

Turning Pollution into DVDs

Carbon dioxide captured from the smokestacks of power plants could one day provide the raw material for plastics

By David Biello

"Researchers announced this week that they are perfecting a procedure designed to turn pollution into a type of plastic used to make everything from DVDs to eyeglass lenses. The effort is being touted as a way to capture and use climate change–causing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from coal-fired power plants and other sources instead of releasing it into the atmosphere or burying it underground.

"One is producing a material from CO₂ instead of just discarding it," chemist Thomas Müller of the Center for Catalysis Research at RWTH Aachen University in Germany said yesterday at a press conference at the semiannual meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans. "It can be a contribution to solving the CO₂ problem."

Plastics such as polycarbonates are long chains of carbon atoms bonded to such elements as oxygen. The tough plastic is currently constructed from the long carbon chains, or polymers, made from fossil fuels. But Müller says that chemists could convert the nearly 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted by coal-fired power plants—if captured—into such plastics by applying pressure and using energy to trigger the necessary chemical reaction."

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=turning-pollution-into-dvds&sc=rss
this is the link if you wish to continue reading


This is absolutely fascinating to me. In essence we would be recycling the very thing that has been causing the problems all along. I know this isn't the answer to all our problems but its a start.

I think that a lot of people put way to much attention on whats going on in the now! "Now there is a hole in the O-Zone!" "Now the ice caps are melting!" "Now the temperature of the Earth is rising more and more every year!"
Just for the record I wanted everyone to know that there is as much hope in the future as there has ever been in history. There is attention being given to our problems. There are theories being written on how to best prepare for everything that we can so far perceive and believe could happen to us. We're going to be all right, are children are going to be all right, our children's children will be all right.

Here's to the Future
-Markus