Plastic Bags May be Used to Charge Smartphones

MEXICO – Researchers have learned to make good use of discarded plastic bags. It is so because they have found a way to convert plastic bags into carbon chips for batteries. Taking into consideration the growing problem of plastic pollution, this seems a good way to make use of discarded plastic bags. As we all know that people across the world have shunned the use of plastic bags for various daily purposes. Also, various governments and organizations have banned the use of plastic materials to reduce plastic pollution. The main goal of the researchers at Purdue University and Universidad Tecnologica de Queretaro in Mexico was to find a simple, inexpensive way to turn used plastic bags into an energy-storing carbon.

Plastic takes a long time period of 100 years to decompose as it slowly degrades with sunlight. In this process, it releases toxic chemicals into the environment, claims Ocean Cleanup. California government has banned the use of plastic bags at retail stores and organizations all over the world are fighting to combat the high amount of plastic garbage patches in the Pacific ocean.

“Over 5 trillion pieces of plastic currently litter the ocean. Trash accumulates in 5 ocean garbage patches, the largest one being the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California,” a spokesperson at Ocean Cleanup quoted.

In the previous studies, scientists had known that polyethylene in plastic could be converted into energy-storing carbon but the previous methods to “upcycle” polyethylene into pure carbon were not only complex but expensive too. This time, in the new low-cost method, researchers immersed polyethylene bags in sulfuric acid and heated the bags in a special reactor to just below polyethylene’s melting point.

Hence, by allowing polyethylene to be heated until the temperature below the melting point, it has been possible to prevent its vaporization into hazardous gases. After removing the treated polyethylene from the reactor and it is heated in a furnace to produce pure carbon. In the final step, the carbon is grounded into a black powder which is used to make anodes for lithium-ion batteries. The researchers claimed that the batteries thus formed were used to supply power to toy truck and these batteries performed comparably to commercial batteries.