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.
