Up cycling and its Benefits

            The amount of trash in this world continues to be a concern to us. Landfills are exponentially growing because the material in them is not biodegradable. And because we have more waste than space to put it, many types of wildlife, especially marine wildlife, are harmed by the trash. If we don’t start reducing our massive amount, then we could predict a world in which every street and every city would be buried in trash. But recently, scientists have found a way to take waste and make something useful out of it. This is called Upcycling.

            Upcycling kills two birds with one stone because it gets rid of the trash and turns into something beneficial. One of the recently discovered Upcycling processes is through the burning of plastic bags. Every year, Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags. Vilas Pol, a scientist in California, has found a way to make those plastic bags useful. First, he cuts his plastic bags into small pieces and then puts them into a reactor that is about 1000 degrees. If you were to put a plastic bag on a stove, then it would release a lot of carbon dioxide and other dangerous chemicals which can cause cancer. After three hours of being in the reactor, the result product is black powder. But this black powder is actually billions of carbon nanotubes.

            Carbon nanotubes are tiny fragments of pure carbon that are in the form of cylinders. The useful application of these nanotubes is that they can conduct electricity a lot better than silicon. They have already been in use in computers for only a couple of years, but the word about this material is not yet out across the whole world. Vilas Pol has already started putting nanotubes in lithium batteries. These batteries which get stimulated with carbon nanotubes work ten times better and can store three times as much energy. The possibilities for carbon nanotubes are endless and it all comes from something that we tend to use on a daily basis. If we could start burning all the plastic bags in the world, then we would have nearly an unlimited supply of carbon nanotubes.

            Another process of upcylcing is the burning of our everyday trash. Incinerators have been around for a long time, but incinerators give out bad emissions and don’t give out a useful product. But using the incinerator to create energy is something that people are working on. First, all the trash is burned and that excess of heat becomes steam and spins a turbine. As the turbine spins it creates energy and powers homes. A Garbage to energy plant in Wisconsin already powers 18,000 homes using their own trash.

            The initial problem with trash is that we don’t have space for it. But now we can restore that space by getting rid of the trash and using it for Upcycling. If we can start making these processes global processes, then we wouldn’t have to worry about overcrowded landfills which are bad for natural wildlife.