Happy Christmas everyone!
Welcome back to our weekly round-up.
Climate-technicals
Spicing your life up through our reviews of climate-tech papers and innovations.
Where them Haber fanboys?
Frequently underestimated, often misunderstood, synthetic fertilisers like urea have a problem: they love energy. In fact, they love it so much that 2% of annual global energy goes towards the production of urea…
In order to combat this, Lv et al. have come up with a solution. In our article we take a look at their paper "Selective electrocatalytic synthesis of urea with nitrate and carbon dioxide", which delves into sustainable urea production through combining C02 with N03- at room temperature.
Bioenergy ain't sustainable?
Meet BECCS (Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), the bioenergy process which removes carbon from the atmosphere:
Seems pretty epic right? Well... hold your horses. In this article, we review "Global bioenergy with carbon capture and storage potential is largely constrained by sustainable irrigation", a paper by Ai et al. which critically analyses BECCS and it’s serious limitation: water.
Through their paper, this research team reveals how sustainable water management could be used on bioenergy crop plantations and how significantly limited BECCS is if we put constraints down.
Biodegradation is overrated
Around 368 million tons of plastics were produced worldwide in 2019, with most ending up in landfill or the natural environment. It's time for a change, and in our article, we investigate a plastic reprocessing technology which could facilitate the development of a circular plastic economy.
In the paper "Hydroplastic polymers as eco-friendly hydrosetting plastics" by Wang et al, we are introduced to a sustainable hydrosetting method used to process a new hydroplastic polymer made from cellulose cinnamate (CCi). These transparent membranes are robust, durable, and can be repeatedly reprogrammed into other 2D/3D shapes using water as shown:
The polymers can be processed and reprogrammed to other shapes more than 15x using just water. How's that for sustainability!
It's markedly different from classical processing methods which involve expensive and complex machines, harsh conditions, or high temperatures.
Thanks again for joining us this week! Looking forward to seeing you next time where we’ll bring you:
-A Fireside Chat with Deep Tech Ventures
-A look at creating electricity from seaweed.
Best,
Pete
Blue Tech Base