How do they achieve this? Simply by heating these waste materials (food waste such as banana peelings and even plastics) containing carbon at 2,800 degrees Celsius. However, this process has to be carried out at a custom-designed reactor that heats the material rapidly and removes all non-carbon elements, such as gas. An operation that takes just 10 milliseconds.
In this way, it is obtained in this way small graphene particles which, as the university says, "remove greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, that food waste would have emitted in landfills".
In addition, the researchers point out that these graphene particles flash can be added to cement used to produce concreteThis reduces the amount of CO2 generated in the production of this essential building material.
James Tour, one of the researchers on the project, says that with a concentration of just 0.1% of this graphene, the graphene could be used in a variety of applications. flash in cement to create new concrete "could reduce its massive environmental impact by a third". In this respect, he explains that "by strengthening concrete with graphene, less would need to be used in construction. and it would also cost less to manufacture and transport.
