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Plastics into Power? Scientist Working on the Answer
What’s one environmentally friendly way to deal with the millions of plastic bags bottles now used and discarded around the world, including Armenia? Walk into any supermarket in Yerevan and you can see the number of plastic bags handed out in a day. What happens to them?
Dr. Vilas Pol , a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois says that rather than languishing in landfills or littering roadsides, plastic bags could make their way into useful products like toner, lubricants, or rechargeable cell phone or laptop batteries, if new research becomes commercialized.
Plastic recycling is limited by the fact that different types of plastic cannot be mixed. The quality of the resulting recycled plastic may also be poor. "That's why recycling is not very successful," said study author Vilas Pol of Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill.
"I was thinking why not go beyond this," he said. "Take it and degrade it. You can take the different kinds of plastics together."
In a process that is as simple as throwing bits of plastic in a chamber and heating it up, Pol can turn the plastic into tiny spheres of pure carbon just a few microns across.
These spheres, which conduct heat and electricity, could be useful in a long list of applications from tires to batteries to lubricants.
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