This powder removes as much CO₂ from the air as a tree
Berkeley chemists have created a reusable material that pulls carbon dioxide from the air and holds onto it until it can be stored.
A typical large tree can suck as much as 40 kilograms of carbon dioxide out of the air over the course of a year. Now scientists at UC Berkeley say they can do the same job with less than half a pound of a fluffy yellow powder.
The powder was designed to trap the greenhouse gas in its microscopic pores, then release it when it’s ready to be squirreled away someplace where it can’t contribute to global warming. In tests, the material was still in fine form after 100 such cycles, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“It performs beautifully,” said Omar Yaghi, a reticular chemist at UC Berkeley and the study’s senior author. “Based on the stability and the behavior of the material right now, we think it will go to thousands of cycles.”
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