7 ms·

Scientists make plastic from a sugar and carbon dioxide

127 points by phr4ts 9y ago

fokinsean 9y ago
> This new type of polycarbonate can be biodegraded back into carbon dioxide and sugar using enzymes from soil bacteria This sounds amazing, but reading about various awesome breakthroughs has made me a bit cynical since there always is some sort of catch. Does anyone know any limitations to this method which would make it difficult to scale?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  If there are any, they'd probably be discussed in the actual papers and not here. I don't know if the UK is better, but at least in the US, university press releases about this or that research paper are usually garbage. Does anyone have access to the actual papers? Georgina L. Gregory, Gabriele Kociok-Köhn and Antoine Buchard “Polymers from sugars and CO2: ring-opening polymerisation and copolymerisation of cyclic carbonates derived from 2-deoxy-D-ribose” DOI: 10.1039/C7PY00236J Polymer Chemistry, 2017, 8, 2093-2104 Georgina L. Gregory, Elizabeth M. Hierons, Gabriele Kociok-Köhn, Ram I. Sharma and Antoine Buchard “CO2-Driven stereochemical inversion of sugars to create thymidine-based polycarbonates by ring-opening polymerisation” DOI: 10.1039/C7PY00118E Polymer Chemistry, 2017, 8, 1714-1721 Georgina L. Gregory, Liliana M. Jenisch, Bethan Charles, Gabriele Kociok-Köhn, and Antoine Buchard “Polymers from Sugars and CO2: Synthesis and Polymerization of a d-Mannose-Based Cyclic Carbonate” DOI: 10.1021/acs.macromol.6b01492 Macromolecules, 2016, 49, 7165-7169
  - asdfghj123 9y ago
    https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00236J https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00236J https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00118E https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00118E https://sci-hub.io/10.1021/acs.macromol.6b01492 https://sci-hub.io/10.1021/acs.macromol.6b01492
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - sndean 9y ago
    They're on Sci-Hub, for the desperate. But, just glancing at them, they look legitimate. ACS especially doesn't accept low quality stuff (including some of my own work..)
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    If there are limitations to scaling, they'll probably not spell them out in the papers either. It's unfortunate, but "negative" aspects of one's own results are strongly suppressed in scientific publishing. And I'm not in any way pointing the finger at these particular authors, I'm pretty sure they're excellent scientists, it's just a problem in general. I had a look around, and the papers aren't on any preprint servers etc. I guess we could violate copyrights, but a better solution might be that someone emails George and asks if she can get the preprints posted somewhere. Edit: there's a preprint of the 2015 paper here: http://opus.bath.ac.uk/44557/ http://opus.bath.ac.uk/44557/
- azernik 9y ago
  My guess? Energy usage. One reason why crude oil, a fuel source, is also such a good chemical feedstock is that it contains a lot of complex, high-energy hydrocarbons. These are the kinds of complicated molecules that require a lot of energy input to form, and hence release lots of energy when burned. Reversing this process and turning simple carbohydrates plus carbon dioxide into complex carbohydrates is usually a highly endothermic reaction.
  - ryanmarsh 9y ago
    Which is why the use of the word "sustainable" here is suspect. Sustainable in that one day we will run out of oil? Yes. Sustainable in that the inputs do not exceed the outputs? That remains to be seen.
- shanev 9y ago
  One limitation I see is the dependence on soil bacteria. We are already losing soil at alarming rate due to industrial farming. In the coming years it's going to be even more of a scarce resource.
collyw 9y ago
I read the headline and though "just what we need more plastic". I was pleasantly surprised to see that its biodegradable
- wuschel 9y ago
  The question is, under what degradation conditions (time, bacteria, etc), and what other threat vector does the material bring to animal life.
  - collyw 9y ago
    True, but biodegradable is still better than not.
    - jwdunne 9y ago
      Well no. Plastic biogrades at a snail's pace. Timescales differ on type of plastic. Plastic bags apparently take 20 years to biodegrade, for instance. PVC pipes are used in plumbing because biodegradation is extremely slow - not that it doesn't ever happen.
      - collyw 9y ago
        I wasn't aware that plastic bags / pipes biodegraded at all, hence my position.
        jdmichal 9y ago
        I think plastics are one of those things where, dumped into a random place, they probably won't be biodegraded. However, for any given plastic, there is probably some organism in existence which will eat it under some or all conditions. So the usage of "biodegradable" maybe depends on which viewpoint you are interested in. For example, here's the wiki on polyethylene, which seems like the typical plastic for "plastic bags" from a store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene#Biodegrading_plastics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene#Biodegrading_plas...
yellowapple 9y ago
Any details available on the processes involved?
mchannon 9y ago
The title of the article's pretty misleading. "sugar" means to most people either sucrose or glucose. Fructose, lactose, etc. could also qualify. No, this uses a very obscure and expensive chemical called thymidine (most cost-effectively harvested from herring sperm, and primary precursor for anti-AIDS drug AZT). It may be "a sugar", but this article's playing fast and loose, akin to calling any pharmaceutical that ends with citrate or chloride "salt".
- mrob 9y ago
  It also calls polycarbonate "scratch-resistant" when anybody who's worked with it knows it isn't. "Scratch-resistant coatings for phones, CDs and DVDs", really? CDs and DVDs are made of polycarbonate and they scratch easily.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Resistant is always a though word. The important, but hidden measurements are cost to produce, etc but relative to most other cheap, though, and clear materials... CD's are actually very scratch resistant even though they often get lot's of small scratches.
    - jdmichal 9y ago
      > CD's are actually very scratch resistant even though they often get lot's of small scratches. This is a bit of an oxymoronic sentence. How can something be both scratch resistant, while accumulating a large number of scratches? The scratches a CD accumulates won't typically affect the ability to read from them, but that's due to the focal length of the reader, not the material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Integrity
      - Retric 9y ago
        Resistance is not immunity. Bullet proof glass for example gets damaged by bullets. The trade off is always in how much damage and how quickly. CD's will easily survive with even moderate levels of care. What people forget is the covering is really designed to protect the data layer not the surface. And in that context the clear plastic is actually better protection than the backside.
derefr 9y ago
Fun fact: cellulose (in wood) and chitin (in insect exoskeletons, fish scales, fungus cell-walls, etc.) are also polymers of glucose-derived sugars. Both are biodegradable, although humans can only digest the latter of the two. Other fun fact: before the invention of entirely-synthetic plastics, we had phenolic sheets: layers of plain cellulose laminated together, originally using natural resin (tree sap), then later using synthetic resins, like Bakelite. These didn't have all the properties of synthetic plastics—you couldn't bend them, for example—but you could form them into shapes and introduce pigments, etc., while manufacturing. The earliest Printed Circuit Boards were Bakelite phenolic boards. (And even today, PCB insulator material is effectively a "synthetic phenolic board": it's fibre-reinforced plastic, which uses plastic itself in place of resin—and various synthetic fibres in place of cellulose—to achieve the same properties phenolic sheets have.)
- workerIbe 9y ago
  Another feature of Bakelite is that after 60 years or so it tends to smell strongly, closely mimicking the smell of vomit. Hopefully any new formulations fare better.
2_listerine_pls 9y ago
After extracting the sugar, many sugarcane mills burn the biomass (bagasse) for energy. So, they already have a free supply of CO2. edit: Never mind, they are talking about another type of sugar.
ValleyOfTheMtns 9y ago
Sounds like this could also be really useful for future manufacturing industries on the surface of Mars or in the atmosphere of Venus. Polycarbonate also seems to have some resistance to sulfuric acid, which would be particularly useful in the Venusian atmosphere.
ValleyOfTheMtns 9y ago
Sounds like this could also be really useful for future manufacturing industries on the surface of Mars or in the atmosphere of Venus. Polycarbonate also seems to have some resistance to sulfuric acid, which would be particularly useful in the Venusian atmosphere.

127 points by phr4ts 9y ago

> This new type of polycarbonate can be biodegraded back into carbon dioxide and sugar using enzymes from soil bacteria This sounds amazing, but reading about various awesome breakthroughs has made me a bit cynical since there always is some sort of catch. Does anyone know any limitations to this method which would make it difficult to scale?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Analemma_ 9y ago
If there are any, they'd probably be discussed in the actual papers and not here. I don't know if the UK is better, but at least in the US, university press releases about this or that research paper are usually garbage. Does anyone have access to the actual papers? Georgina L. Gregory, Gabriele Kociok-Köhn and Antoine Buchard “Polymers from sugars and CO2: ring-opening polymerisation and copolymerisation of cyclic carbonates derived from 2-deoxy-D-ribose” DOI: 10.1039/C7PY00236J Polymer Chemistry, 2017, 8, 2093-2104 Georgina L. Gregory, Elizabeth M. Hierons, Gabriele Kociok-Köhn, Ram I. Sharma and Antoine Buchard “CO2-Driven stereochemical inversion of sugars to create thymidine-based polycarbonates by ring-opening polymerisation” DOI: 10.1039/C7PY00118E Polymer Chemistry, 2017, 8, 1714-1721 Georgina L. Gregory, Liliana M. Jenisch, Bethan Charles, Gabriele Kociok-Köhn, and Antoine Buchard “Polymers from Sugars and CO2: Synthesis and Polymerization of a d-Mannose-Based Cyclic Carbonate” DOI: 10.1021/acs.macromol.6b01492 Macromolecules, 2016, 49, 7165-7169
- asdfghj123 9y ago
  https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00236J https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00236J https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00118E https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00118E https://sci-hub.io/10.1021/acs.macromol.6b01492 https://sci-hub.io/10.1021/acs.macromol.6b01492
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sndean 9y ago
  They're on Sci-Hub, for the desperate. But, just glancing at them, they look legitimate. ACS especially doesn't accept low quality stuff (including some of my own work..)
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  If there are limitations to scaling, they'll probably not spell them out in the papers either. It's unfortunate, but "negative" aspects of one's own results are strongly suppressed in scientific publishing. And I'm not in any way pointing the finger at these particular authors, I'm pretty sure they're excellent scientists, it's just a problem in general. I had a look around, and the papers aren't on any preprint servers etc. I guess we could violate copyrights, but a better solution might be that someone emails George and asks if she can get the preprints posted somewhere. Edit: there's a preprint of the 2015 paper here: http://opus.bath.ac.uk/44557/ http://opus.bath.ac.uk/44557/
azernik 9y ago
My guess? Energy usage. One reason why crude oil, a fuel source, is also such a good chemical feedstock is that it contains a lot of complex, high-energy hydrocarbons. These are the kinds of complicated molecules that require a lot of energy input to form, and hence release lots of energy when burned. Reversing this process and turning simple carbohydrates plus carbon dioxide into complex carbohydrates is usually a highly endothermic reaction.
- ryanmarsh 9y ago
  Which is why the use of the word "sustainable" here is suspect. Sustainable in that one day we will run out of oil? Yes. Sustainable in that the inputs do not exceed the outputs? That remains to be seen.
shanev 9y ago
One limitation I see is the dependence on soil bacteria. We are already losing soil at alarming rate due to industrial farming. In the coming years it's going to be even more of a scarce resource.

collyw 9y ago

I read the headline and though "just what we need more plastic". I was pleasantly surprised to see that its biodegradable

wuschel 9y ago
The question is, under what degradation conditions (time, bacteria, etc), and what other threat vector does the material bring to animal life.
- collyw 9y ago
  True, but biodegradable is still better than not.
  - jwdunne 9y ago
    Well no. Plastic biogrades at a snail's pace. Timescales differ on type of plastic. Plastic bags apparently take 20 years to biodegrade, for instance. PVC pipes are used in plumbing because biodegradation is extremely slow - not that it doesn't ever happen.
    - collyw 9y ago
      I wasn't aware that plastic bags / pipes biodegraded at all, hence my position.
      - jdmichal 9y ago
        I think plastics are one of those things where, dumped into a random place, they probably won't be biodegraded. However, for any given plastic, there is probably some organism in existence which will eat it under some or all conditions. So the usage of "biodegradable" maybe depends on which viewpoint you are interested in. For example, here's the wiki on polyethylene, which seems like the typical plastic for "plastic bags" from a store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene#Biodegrading_plastics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene#Biodegrading_plas...

yellowapple 9y ago

Any details available on the processes involved?

mchannon 9y ago

The title of the article's pretty misleading. "sugar" means to most people either sucrose or glucose. Fructose, lactose, etc. could also qualify. No, this uses a very obscure and expensive chemical called thymidine (most cost-effectively harvested from herring sperm, and primary precursor for anti-AIDS drug AZT). It may be "a sugar", but this article's playing fast and loose, akin to calling any pharmaceutical that ends with citrate or chloride "salt".

mrob 9y ago
It also calls polycarbonate "scratch-resistant" when anybody who's worked with it knows it isn't. "Scratch-resistant coatings for phones, CDs and DVDs", really? CDs and DVDs are made of polycarbonate and they scratch easily.
- Retric 9y ago
  Resistant is always a though word. The important, but hidden measurements are cost to produce, etc but relative to most other cheap, though, and clear materials... CD's are actually very scratch resistant even though they often get lot's of small scratches.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    > CD's are actually very scratch resistant even though they often get lot's of small scratches. This is a bit of an oxymoronic sentence. How can something be both scratch resistant, while accumulating a large number of scratches? The scratches a CD accumulates won't typically affect the ability to read from them, but that's due to the focal length of the reader, not the material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Integrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Integrity
    - Retric 9y ago
      Resistance is not immunity. Bullet proof glass for example gets damaged by bullets. The trade off is always in how much damage and how quickly. CD's will easily survive with even moderate levels of care. What people forget is the covering is really designed to protect the data layer not the surface. And in that context the clear plastic is actually better protection than the backside.

derefr 9y ago

Fun fact: cellulose (in wood) and chitin (in insect exoskeletons, fish scales, fungus cell-walls, etc.) are also polymers of glucose-derived sugars. Both are biodegradable, although humans can only digest the latter of the two. Other fun fact: before the invention of entirely-synthetic plastics, we had phenolic sheets: layers of plain cellulose laminated together, originally using natural resin (tree sap), then later using synthetic resins, like Bakelite. These didn't have all the properties of synthetic plastics—you couldn't bend them, for example—but you could form them into shapes and introduce pigments, etc., while manufacturing. The earliest Printed Circuit Boards were Bakelite phenolic boards. (And even today, PCB insulator material is effectively a "synthetic phenolic board": it's fibre-reinforced plastic, which uses plastic itself in place of resin—and various synthetic fibres in place of cellulose—to achieve the same properties phenolic sheets have.)

workerIbe 9y ago
Another feature of Bakelite is that after 60 years or so it tends to smell strongly, closely mimicking the smell of vomit. Hopefully any new formulations fare better.

2_listerine_pls 9y ago

After extracting the sugar, many sugarcane mills burn the biomass (bagasse) for energy. So, they already have a free supply of CO2. edit: Never mind, they are talking about another type of sugar.

ValleyOfTheMtns 9y ago

Sounds like this could also be really useful for future manufacturing industries on the surface of Mars or in the atmosphere of Venus. Polycarbonate also seems to have some resistance to sulfuric acid, which would be particularly useful in the Venusian atmosphere.

ValleyOfTheMtns 9y ago