A Cambridge University team made the device with simple materials using a paint sprayer—offering a possible dual fix for plastic pollution and dirty hydrogen production
But seriously, this doesn’t make any sense to my ( chemisty course flunking ) head:
They have made a device that uses sunlight to break down plastic waste and turn it into hydrogen. And it’s not just a lab curiosity. The team made it using simple methods and materials, and have tested it outside in the sunlight.
Where does the carbon go? What about the oxygen? Does the sun burn them? I don’t get it
Inorganic chemistry is fairly simple and fun as long as you keep it in the lab. Industrial-scale inorganic chemistry gets ridiculously complicated because all the reactants and products are complicated and messy. Also, a large reactor will have all sorts of gradients, which means that the reactions take place in unfavourable conditions all the time. None of it is ideal, and none of it follows simplified laws or rules very well.
Sure, we have all sorts of fancy calculations, but none of them predict very accurately what’s going to happen and when. Even the best models and theories give approximate and crude answers when you’re dealing with messy industrial-scale chemistry.
Models give you a rough idea, lab experiments give you a decent idea, but running the process at full scale is the only way to find out exactly how those reactions really work in real life.
Turns out, our theories are too simple to handle complicated solutions. They can predict the behaviour of simple solutions very well, but that’s not good enough. In real life, you rarely have well behaved clean reagents.
Dangers like that can be identified quite easily. It’s a qualitative thing, and qualitative chemistry is pretty robust. For instance, we can say that there’s a risk that a particular reaction will produce hydrogen under specific circumstances. We’ll just build the plant accordingly instead of trusting that we can always operate the plant correctly. Sooner or later, you’ll end up running the plant in the wrong way, and you’ll produce some hydrogen, so it’s good to have a plant that can detect and deal with it safely.
However, usually the idea is to produce something entirely different, and do so efficiently. Those sorts of questions are quantitative, and that’s where things can and will go wrong all the time. Like, how do you ensure that your expensive catalyst isn’t covered in goo, or corrosion doesn’t eat your fancy impeller? How do you ensure that the amount of impurities in the product will remain reasonably low? It’s all about the quantities and reaction rates, and that’s the hard part with inorganic chemistry.
It’s also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.
I loved biology and statistics, and was pretty neutral towards calculus, but for some reason, chemistry is incomprehensible to me (Physics too, but that’s because neither the teacher nor I knew how to use my Casio graphing calculator, so I tried to do all the math on paper and ended up wasting the whole class doing arithmetic instead of listening-I’ve thought about taking a basic physics course at a community college, but I don’t think even that would help with chemistry).
My sister’s a science teacher and was taking masters level organic chemistry classes while I was taking high school chemistry. At one point she showed me some of her coursework and I literally decided in that moment that I didn’t want to study biology badly enough to go through organic chemistry.
That sounds like she’s a really bad teacher, lol, but my strengths are definitely in different areas, so it’s also a fair insight.
Besides H2 evolution, the oxidation products from the photocatalytic reforming process were also analyzed using ion chromatography and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The major oxidation products detected after 22 h were formate and acetate (from pretreated cellulose), as well as glycolaldehyde (GAld) dimer and glycolate (from pretreated PET),
“…in a petri dish”
But seriously, this doesn’t make any sense to my ( chemisty course flunking ) head:
Where does the carbon go? What about the oxygen? Does the sun burn them? I don’t get it
Organic chem is fun. It’s also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.
Short answer? This substrate produces H2, formate and acetate. The carbon would mostly be dissolving via formic acid into formate.
Long answer?
Organic Chemistry is literally magic, don’t think about it too hard unless you’ve dedicated your life to it.
Inorganic chemistry is fairly simple and fun as long as you keep it in the lab. Industrial-scale inorganic chemistry gets ridiculously complicated because all the reactants and products are complicated and messy. Also, a large reactor will have all sorts of gradients, which means that the reactions take place in unfavourable conditions all the time. None of it is ideal, and none of it follows simplified laws or rules very well.
Sure, we have all sorts of fancy calculations, but none of them predict very accurately what’s going to happen and when. Even the best models and theories give approximate and crude answers when you’re dealing with messy industrial-scale chemistry.
Models give you a rough idea, lab experiments give you a decent idea, but running the process at full scale is the only way to find out exactly how those reactions really work in real life.
Turns out, our theories are too simple to handle complicated solutions. They can predict the behaviour of simple solutions very well, but that’s not good enough. In real life, you rarely have well behaved clean reagents.
This comment is chilling. Makes me think we should be thankful that chem plants aren’t just constantly going boom.
Dangers like that can be identified quite easily. It’s a qualitative thing, and qualitative chemistry is pretty robust. For instance, we can say that there’s a risk that a particular reaction will produce hydrogen under specific circumstances. We’ll just build the plant accordingly instead of trusting that we can always operate the plant correctly. Sooner or later, you’ll end up running the plant in the wrong way, and you’ll produce some hydrogen, so it’s good to have a plant that can detect and deal with it safely.
However, usually the idea is to produce something entirely different, and do so efficiently. Those sorts of questions are quantitative, and that’s where things can and will go wrong all the time. Like, how do you ensure that your expensive catalyst isn’t covered in goo, or corrosion doesn’t eat your fancy impeller? How do you ensure that the amount of impurities in the product will remain reasonably low? It’s all about the quantities and reaction rates, and that’s the hard part with inorganic chemistry.
I loved biology and statistics, and was pretty neutral towards calculus, but for some reason, chemistry is incomprehensible to me (Physics too, but that’s because neither the teacher nor I knew how to use my Casio graphing calculator, so I tried to do all the math on paper and ended up wasting the whole class doing arithmetic instead of listening-I’ve thought about taking a basic physics course at a community college, but I don’t think even that would help with chemistry).
My sister’s a science teacher and was taking masters level organic chemistry classes while I was taking high school chemistry. At one point she showed me some of her coursework and I literally decided in that moment that I didn’t want to study biology badly enough to go through organic chemistry.
That sounds like she’s a really bad teacher, lol, but my strengths are definitely in different areas, so it’s also a fair insight.
what the…?!?
Statements dreamt up by the utterly deranged /s
They are playing us for fools
I suspect that the leftovers can be processed more easily. It would be nice of the article to talk about what residuals are left.
burn any hydrocarbon, you get hydrogen/water and C02.
That’s bad
from the article (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44286-026-00406-y) linked in the article:
seems very resources intensive, and with specific reagents/chemicals.
incomplete combustion, likely some nasty nitrates in there.
We’ll just dump them in the ocean. Nothing bad has ever happened from just dumping things in the ocean.