New Green Technology

There are roughly 1.5 billion cows in the world all raised by humans for their meat and milk. Each of these 1300 pound cows eat a lot. When these animals graze they produce a lot of methane from their cud. In fact, each dairy cow produces a whopping 110 kg of methane annually and 55kg per beef cow as well. This methane when released into the air absorbs and traps heat making it a greenhouse gas. This gas is roughly 30 times as potent as co2 at trapping heat within the air. This is an enormous problem and a new innovation was recently created to contain this problem.

Typically, the 660 billion pounds of plastic made by humans annually is made by exposing hydro­carbons from fossil fuels to a mass amount of pressure and energy. This process creates three times as much carbon dioxide by weight as the actual plastic. A product now selling from the Newlight Technologies is called Aircarbon. Aircarbon is created by combining air with methane-based carbon emissions creating a plastic material that is made of roughly 40% oxygen from the air and 60% carbon and hydrogen from captured methane. Methane emissions are all captured from the methane waste from farms, milk farms, water treatment plants, landfills, and energy facilities that would otherwise pollute the air.

Aircarbon can reduce methane emissions and carbon pollution while improving the world–displacing oil. The technology has been there for a while now but Newlight Technologies only recently created a business module to actually launch the product. Newlight’s first commercial plant, in California, captures methane generated by a dairy farm’s waste lagoon and transports it to a bioreactor. The bioreactor contains enzymes that combine the gas with air to form a polymer. This process can actually compete with the oil-based plastics and do many of the things that oil-based plastic can do creating a market-­driven solution to global warming. The company is now selling Aircarbon Chairs, Phone cases and plastic bags.