Latest Technologies
Recycling mixed medical waste with steam cracking
Currently, medical waste streams are complicated to recycle because these single-use products — such as facemasks, syringes, nitrile gloves and non-woven gowns — consist of multiple materials and must be considered contaminated with potentially infectious particles. Now, researchers at Chalmers…
Comprehensive destruction of airborne contaminants in a compact bioreactor
There are many categories of air contaminants that may be encountered in industry, from volatile organic compounds to aerosols to viruses, as well as a range of particulate matter and ultra-fine particles, which also vary greatly in size and properties.…
Chementator Briefs
Tire recycling The Mitsubishi Chemical Group (MCG; Tokyo, Japan; www.mcgc.com) has demonstrated chemical recycling of end-of-life tires (ELTs) using the coke ovens at its Kagawa Plant (Sakaide City, Kagawa Prefecture). The company is able to feed crushed ELTs as raw…
Scaleup underway for super-efficient silver refining
A significant contributor to the cost, energy consumption and carbon footprint of silver production is in the refining steps to remove, recover and recycle zinc from Parkes Crust silver-zinc intermetallic compounds. A fundamental redesign of the silver process to improve…
Scaling up brine electrolysis for high-purity lithium hydroxide
A significant portion of the energy and cost requirements in the production of lithium-ion batteries stems from the cost of converting lithium sulfate or lithium chloride into lithium hydroxide monohydrate (LHM) of sufficient purity for battery use. Noram Electrolysis Systems,…
A low-cost coating system designed to optimize water electrolysis
Seemingly small component changes can make a large impact on the productivity of electrochemistry systems, such as electrolyzers used for producing “green” hydrogen. For example, a new coating technology developed by Oxford nanoSystems Ltd. (OnS; Abingdon, U.K.; www.oxfordnanosystems.com), when applied…
Chemists observe a new type of single-electron covalent bond
At Hokkaido University in Japan, researchers led by Takuya Shimajiri and Associate Professor Yusuke Ishigaki have made the first-ever observation of a stable, single-electron carbon-carbon covalent bond. Covalent bonds, in which two atoms are bound together by sharing a pair…
New plant in Finland will demonstrate low-cost biographite production
CarbonScape Ltd. (Riverlands, New Zealand) announces a significant leap forward in its journey towards commercialization by selecting the Sunila site in Finland, owned by Stora Enso Oyj (Helsinki, Finland; a co-owner of CarbonScape), as the location for its biographite demonstration…
Recycling process allows fast depolymerization of post-consumer mixed textiles
Recycling rates for post-consumer textile waste are very low (<0.5%) because the fabrics often consist of tightly interlaced synthetic and natural fibers that require costly sorting and separation processes, and because they often contain dyes and additives that must be…
First industrial demonstration of plasma-based CO2 conversion
Plasma technology is being explored as an avenue for many molecular conversions, such as methane reforming. Now, for the first time, a plasma-based CO2-conversion technology is being demonstrated industrially. The proprietary technology, developed by D-CRBN (Antwerp, Belgium; www.d-crbn.com), is being…