My son just dropped a cool paper on me. [View all]
It's this one: Carolyn E. Schaefer, Kunal Kupwade-Patil, Michael Ortega, Carmen Soriano, Oral Büyüköztürk, Anne E. White, Michael P. Short, Irradiated recycled plastic as a concrete additive for improved chemo-mechanical properties and lower carbon footprint, Waste Management, Volume 71, 2018, Pages 426-439.
Over the years, I've sent my son papers I thought cool. As he surveys the faculties at the graduate schools to which he's applied, he's reading their papers and came across this one.
Now he's sending me papers. I am thrilled to have lived to this day.
About what's in the paper:
For the record, even though most of us think plastic is recycled, very little of it actually is. Significantly better than 80% ends up in landfills.
Ideally, plastic represents an opportunity to sequester carbon, if and only if, the carbon for it is captured from air, possibly via the intermediacy of seawater. The route for the conversion of CO2 to plastic is the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to give methanol, followed by chemistry known as "MTO," Methanol to olefins. Olefins, properly known as alkenes, are the monomeric precursors to many plastics.
Plastic is only sustainable in a closed cycle. In an open cycle it is extremely dangerous, as we are realizing, too late actually, under current conditions.
In this paper, the authors propose irradiating waste plastic with gamma radiation obtained from used nuclear fuels in order to harden it for use as a concrete reinforcing agent.
It's a pretty cool paper. Plastic so treated would reduce the carbon input of concrete (which is rather huge) while permanently sequestering carbon in structures.
I wish you happy holidays.
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