The Centre for Process Innovation wants the world's trash.
The European group converts items like banana peels, coffee grinds and other food waste into biogas, and then turns that gas into graphitic carbon and hydrogen. The group has announced its plans to do a trial of its technology in the near future.
The graphitic carbon is a main component of the hot plastics component, graphene. Graphene is in demand because it is flexible and strong.
Hydrogen is expected to power much of the world's machinery. At the moment, hydrogen comes from fossil fuels, but is damaging to the planet and can't be sustained, according to PlasCarb researchers.
So it's a given that the group's latest undertaking - a three-year project called PlasCarb - is attracting interest and financial backing from around the world.
The good thing here is the benefit of taking trash and turning it into fuel gives producers an alternative to creating biofuels from crops. As most of the hydrogen supply comes from corn, the creation of fuels and materials from garbage could also help prevent the rise in crop prices in creation of biopolymers as well as concerns about food and land shortages.
Graphene is a modern wonder. It is considered among the strongest, most conductive materials on the planet. The material has many uses for the creation of the LED to computers and transistors.
Graphene is not just of interest to European scientists, however.
A major investor in the development of graphene is Bill Gates.
On Monday, the Canadian government awarded an $8.1 million grant to the country's largest graphene producer, Grafoid Inc. to develop graphene. Other recent collaborations involving the development of graphene include a newly-announced pact between the Research Foundation of Stony Brook University of New York and Graphene ESD Corp. of Vancouver, Canada.
PlasCarb, based in the UK, has attracted the interest of a range of scientists and investors from around the world who believe PlasCarb could succeed. After all, garbage will always be handy.
But the Centre for Process Innovation is realistic. It will monitor whether the process can be expanded to meet the demands of companies large and small. It's performing a test trial that will take mountains of waste and turn it into its graphitic carbon and hydrogen.
