Researchers demonstrate how to use the power of the sun to turn plastic waste, such as drinks bottles, into clean hydrogen fuel at a scale large enough to be genuinely useful in the real world using a scalable approach.
  • zabadoh@ani.socialEnglish
    5 days

    From the original paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44286-026-00406-y

    The ground PET bottle was then added to 1.0 M aqueous KOH at a concentration of 50 mg ml−1 and heated to 80 °C for 3 days under stirring to ensure sufficient depolymerization of the PET.

    That’s an awful lot of energy and caustic chemicals (KOH is lye) expended for preprocessing.

    • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5 days

      Not really, seems like a pretty typical to industrialize manufacturing process, and it sounds like it’s pretty forgiving in the range of plastics recycled as well, reducing sorting.

      I expect if they produce these in inexpensive, medium sizes, that a notable percentage of remote communities would get together and run this sort of thing locally.

  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4 days

    Generally speaking, if this is actually a demonstration at “real world scale”, I’d put money on it being a great feat from engineers rather than scientists. Not that the science isn’t also important, it’s just that engineering is what makes anything happen at scale.