Nowadays, people can hardly live without plastic. All kinds of plastic products can be seen everywhere, among which plastic bags, plastic bottles and plastic boxes are typical. These three kinds of disposable plastic products meet people's most needs in eating, drinking and using.
But the plastic brings the convenience to the human life at the same time, also has brought the disaster harm to the human survival environment and even the entire earth ecology.
And the best way to end the harm of plastic is: the use of a full range of biodegradable material substitutes, can make people completely get rid of the dependence on plastic products.
But what about plastic waste that is already in cities, farms and oceans?It's always been a big problem for us to face.
Some time ago, scientists from purdue university in the United States found a clever way to convert polypropylene, which accounts for 25% of the plastic, into a suitable fuel for diesel, with a conversion rate of more than 90%.
Its shortcoming: it is to use manpower and material resources to sort polypropylene first;The other is that it cannot be converted into other plastics that account for 75%.
Recently, British media reported a piece of good news that scientists have found a way to turn all waste plastics into hydrogen fuel.
In the future, plastic waste may be turned into fuel for new cars.On the other hand, the replacement of traditional petroleum fuel with hydrogen fuel, which is converted from waste plastics, has greatly reduced the travel cost of cars and has no pollution.
For the conversion process, scientists at the university of Swansea in the UK say that adding a material that absorbs natural light and exposing the plastic to sunlight can see bubbles forming on the surface, producing hydrogen.If the amount of hydrogen produced is large, it can be collected and used as hydrogen fuel for cars.
Dr Moritz Kuehnel, from Swansea university's department of chemistry, added that compared with traditional methods of disposing of plastic waste, the new energy conversion method has many advantages. One of them is that it saves manpower and material resources.
At present, before disposing of plastic waste, it is often necessary to first sort out the plastic waste that can be used from the piles of plastic waste, and then to subdivide the plastic that can be used into different areas for reuse.
Most of the plastic waste that cannot be reused will eventually be burned or buried in nature in various forms, which will bring harm to the ecological environment.
For the complete elimination of the existing "white pollution", perhaps the waste plastic into hydrogen fuel, can yet be regarded as a grounding method, but also our research and development of photodegradable plastic film provides an important inspiration.
But the end of "white pollution" requires the full range of biodegradable materials.Obviously, we still have a long way to go!