What if you could capture pollution off a smokestack and turn it into a polyester dress, jet fuel or high-end running shoes? That’s something that Oak Ridge National Lab scientists have been working on and it’s already hitting stores. Oak Ridge National Laboratory and LanzaTech, a biotechnology company, have created a synthetic bacterium that eats industrial pollution and secretes useful chemicals as waste.
Those chemicals can then be converted into a variety of products like footwear, fuel, fabric and plastic containers. “Once you have short carbon chains, your ethanol chains, isopropanol chains, you can take those and basically turn them into anything,” said Timothy Tschaplinski, head of biodesign and systems biology for Oak Ridge National Lab. “Now it’s not coming from fossil fuel.”
Typically plastic, synthetic fabric, dye and fuel require base chemicals derived from fossil fuels. Recapturing waste carbon reduces the need for fossil fuels across the whole supply chain. Brands like On running shoes are already trying to make the switch, restructuring products out of pollution-derived carbon. “It’s a win-win situation” Caspar Coppetti, co-founder and executive co-chairman of On, said in a statement. “We are capturing emissions before they pollute our atmosphere and are at the same time moving away from fossil-based materials.”