Plastic from Recycled Waste Gas

A company from New Zealand has successfully tested its new technology and produced 2,3 Butanediol, a compound out of which fuels and plastics can be made.

The clean tech company LanzaTech, had already announced last year that it had been developing a microbe that digests carbon monoxide in waste gas from steel mills, and coverts it into ethanol.

The process is based on fermentation, and it turns out that waste gas from steel mills is an ideal medium because it has a high concentration of carbon monoxide, with little or no hydrogen.

The company hopes that its technology will prove successful on a commercial scale, and the world will be able to continue manufacturing products, energy products included, because this might be a way of escaping fossil fuels addiction.

It could also be a way of protecting local economies, as well as food crops and food crops production, CleanTechnica reports.

This technology opens the way to a commercially viable process of recycling waste gas, as it eliminates the need of investing in an expensive equipment that would normally be necessary to preconditioning gas for microbial life.

Unlike traditional methods where petroleum based plastics are made by cracking petroleum, and bio-based plastics are made by fermenting sugars from plants, the process developed by LanzaTech recovers a byproduct that would otherwise be wasted.

The compounds 2,3 Butanediol can be transformed, thanks to simple processes, into butenes, butadiene and methyl ethyl ketone, which can be used for producing plastic, synthetic rubbers, textiles as well as other products.

Jennifer Holmgren, the company's CEO, says that “LanzaTech is now able to offer an integrated waste gas to fuels and chemicals technology that is both economically and environmentally sound.”

“Commercial viability of novel routes requires the integration of diverse approaches.

“This development means our process can deliver considerable financial returns from the sale of high value products while curbing industrial greenhouse gas emissions.”