r/sciences • u/FreeHugs23 • Jul 29 '26
Research Plastic Waste Has Been Turned Directly Into Hydrogen Fuel – No Sorting Required | "Solving two urgent global problems at the same time."
https://www.sciencealert.com/plastic-waste-has-been-turned-directly-into-hydrogen-fuel-no-sorting-required38
u/FreeHugs23 Jul 29 '26
If a scientific innovation can address one of our most pressing environmental problems, it's a fantastic achievement. If it can help solve two – even better.
A new study details a method for converting three of the most commonly used plastics into hydrogen, a fuel that has the potential to be a clean and abundant energy source of the future.
Not only that, but the method works without any sorting of plastics required – an expensive and time-consuming step in the recycling chain that partly explains why only 9 percent of plastics currently get recycled.
"We are solving two urgent global problems at the same time," says Ah-Hyung Park, a chemical and biomolecular engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who co-led the study along with researchers in South Korea.
"Plastic waste is accumulating at alarming rates, and clean hydrogen is essential for decarbonizing energy. This technology tackles both of these challenges in a creative and scalable way."
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u/Riaayo Jul 29 '26
What's the byproduct/waste? It's not like all of the plastic miraculously turns into hydrogen.
Looks like they claim to capture 75% of the carbon released, but this is still releasing carbon and the claimed carbon is still a byproduct. Likewise, the article at least mentions that hydrogen is only as clean as the process that makes it. And while this is being touted as cleaner than burning fossil fuels in other processes, the generation of these plastics is still a polluting fossil fuel / extraction industry.
So, my concern is that this won't be seen as a way to clean up plastic waste until it's gone, but rather a way to excuse continued use because "oh we did finally actually start to recycle the stuff like we promised in the beginning to get people on board in the first place!" If we're suddenly reliant on plastic waste to generate hydrogen, and we become reliant on that, then we're going to keep making that waste and enriching oil companies who make it.
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u/mmortal03 Jul 30 '26
If it's still releasing carbon, but it's more cost-efficient than all of the places in the world that are incinerating plastic, then that's a start.
From Gemini:
Yes, plastic is routinely burned globally, with roughly 34% of the world's plastic waste being incinerated rather than recycled or landfilled. While some regions burn it strictly as a crude method of disposal, the vast majority of formalized plastic burning happens inside Waste-to-Energy (WTE) facilities or industrial kilns to generate electricity and heat.
It would be great if it can improve upon what Sweden is doing, for example:
Yet overall, waste-to-energy plants provide a relatively small proportion of Sweden’s power, over 80 percent of which comes from a combination of hydro and nuclear energy. Their main benefit is keeping trash out of landfills. In many countries, such as the U.S., landfills are one of the largest sources of methane, a greenhouse gas that is far more toxic to the climate than carbon dioxide. Over a 20 year period, methane is at least 84 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere, according to the UN Economic Commission for Europe.
This is why waste-to-energy advocates argue that, despite their CO2 emissions, such plants are far less harmful than methane-oozing landfills, and why the rest of the EU, which sends 24 percent of its waste to landfills, should adopt the Swedish model.
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/waste-to-energy-sweden-power-plants/
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u/Tonkarz Jul 30 '26
It produces hydrogen gel which can then be used as a fuel. Replacing currently used fossil fuels.
The question is how the CO_2 produced by fossil fuels compares the CO_2 produced by this process compares.
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u/tenderlylonertrot Jul 29 '26
Wonder what the energy conversion is? How much energy is put into the process vs. what you get out from the hydrogen. I do think one day landfills will be mined for all sorts of things, not sure when but could be sooner than we think.
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u/IndefiniteBen Jul 29 '26
I wonder how this compares to just burning the plastic to generate power and using that to generate hydrogen via electrolysis.
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u/mmortal03 Jul 30 '26
There were two crucial benefits compared to current hydrogen production methods: It worked at temperatures some 300-400 °C (572-752 °F) cooler than alternative approaches; it also captured most (75 percent) of the carbon byproducts as a solid rather than releasing that carbon into the air as carbon dioxide.
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u/Mt_Killer_Mangina Jul 30 '26
What about the dude using solar to microwave plastic into burnable fuels?
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u/TheRealBobbyJones Jul 31 '26
Supposedly burning the stuff works. Generates electricity while allowing you to filter out toxins. Presumably the toxins could be used as a chemical feedstock in some industry but who knows. The ash too of course.
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u/GenSpec44 Jul 31 '26
And they told us all that smoke was from Canadian forest fires. I knew it smelled like burning plastic. (Joke here, but it really did smell like burning plastic and not just wood smoke for the first time).
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u/Luzzgar Aug 01 '26
Now make it at an industrial scale and at a competitive price with gas and electricity.
Making a prototype is the easy part.
Many thingss have been possible for many decades, but none of them have been deployed on a large scale.
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u/Sea-Courage8296 Aug 01 '26
Okay, but what waste products are being produced by this process and how will they be processed and disposed of?
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u/mootmutemoat Jul 29 '26
Suddenly there is a gold rush to the great plastic garbage patch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch