USA Today: Plastic made from pollution hits U.S. market
This is pretty amazing!
... Industry experts told them it was a fool's errand. For good reason. Scientists had spent decades trying to capture carbon and use it to make plastic but couldn't do it cheaply enough. The two friends cracked the code by developing a ten-times more efficient bio-catalyst, which strips the carbon from a liquefied gas and rearranges it into a long chain plastic molecule.
The result? Today, the 31-year-old co-founders of California-based Newlight Technologies have two factories that take methane captured from dairy farms and use it to make AirCarbon — plastic that will soon appear in the form of chairs, food containers and automotive parts. Coming next year: cellphone cases for Virgin Mobile. ...
Video at 1:56:
"... The idea is these products are actually able to match on the performance of oil based plastics but in fact out compete on price, so what we have is a market driven carbon capture process, which is really exciting for us....
... We recently had a third party independent analysis done that verified that each on of our grades of plasctic actually sequester more carbon in the production process than they emit. So every single grade that we make is a carbon sink. So this product here, and this product here ... this is all actually pulling carbon on a net basis, including the energy, out of the air."
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