At home, I am surrounded by fossils. They are in my clothes, carpets and soft furnishings, the packaging wrapped around the food I buy and the myriad cleaning products I use every day. Even the contact lenses in my eyes are full of fossils.
I’m not talking about ancient life forms preserved in rock (though I do have quite a lot of those too), but fossilised carbon atoms, laid down millions of years ago and brought back to the surface by the petroleum industry.
Compounds extracted from oil are the backbone of modern life. The vast majority of household products are created, in part, from them. That is around 70,000 classes of product, from shampoo to toothpaste, 15 gigatonnes of which are produced every year, said Jenny Yang at the University of California, Irvine, at a recent US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) panel discussion on making household goods greener.
Advertisement
For someone like me who tries to keep their carbon footprint as small as possible, these products feel like a fossil of a bygone age. Some of the carbon in them will inevitably end up in the atmosphere, making them a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. I can’t choose products that are fossil free, however, as they barely exist. Not yet, anyway. But researchers like Yang are trying to change that.
Carbon is undoubtedly extremely useful. Its ability to form stable chains and link up with other elements make it the basis of chemical compounds with all sorts of desirable properties. Pick up any household product and check the ingredients and you will see a long list of carbon-based compounds that are vital to its function. “When it comes to household products, we cannot decarbonise them. They’re still going to contain carbon,” said at the NAS panel discussion.
The problem isn’t carbon per se, but where we get it from. For decades, the go-to source has been oil. This is a quintessential example of the linear economy, where we extract resources, turn them into products and discard them. But there is a circular alternative, where we instead use abundant sources of waste carbon – such as discarded plastic and carbon dioxide from heavy industry – and so don’t need to extract new hydrocarbons from underground.
There is a name for this process: carbon capture and use, or CCU. This is similar to carbon capture and storage except the captured carbon is used to make new products rather than sequestered in long-term repositories. It isn’t easy to do, however, as converting oxidised carbon – which isn’t chemically useful as it is very unreactive – into useful reactive compounds like ethanol is energy intensive. Advances in microbial fermentation are starting to crack this problem on a large scale, however.
Defossilisation deserves to be more widely known, perhaps splashed as a selling point on products
CCU hardly gets the pulse racing, but I recently heard a new term that I think could catch on: defossilisation. This is to household products what decarbonisation is to energy, transport and industry. Those sectors can remove carbon by using electricity produced from renewables. The household product sector doesn’t have that option, but it can at least stop using fossil carbon.
The seeds of a defossilised household products sector are starting to grow. One of the leading companies in this area is LanzaTech, based in Skokie, Illinois. It uses bacterial fermentation to convert waste CO2 into industrial chemicals such as ethylene, which can then be fed into existing industrial processes. One of its products is emitted from blast furnaces. This CarbonSmart polyester has already been used in clothing from leading brands including Zara, H&M and Adidas.
Defossilisation has the potential to go further than household products. Another area ripe for this approach is plastics used in medicine, such as polypropylene, which tend to be made from virgin materials – i.e. oil. That is because of doubts over the safety of recycled polypropylene, said Craig Bettenhausen at Chemical & Engineering News when moderating the NAS panel.
Ultimately, bacterial fermentation of waste carbon could produce vast amounts of the chemicals widely used by the chemicals industry, such as carbon monoxide, alcohols, ethylene and olefins, according to Yang.
As yet, however, the term defossilisation doesn’t have much currency, said Bettenhausen. But it is beginning to trickle down into the wider world. It deserves to be more widely known, perhaps splashed as a selling point on products made in this way. They might be slightly more expensive than their traditional counterparts but conscientious consumers are willing to pay a premium for greener alternatives. I would certainly shell out a bit more to defossilise my life – if only I knew which products to buy.
Graham’s week
What I’m reading
Not much; I have started work on a new book of my own.
What I’m watching
I enjoyed Hunt for the Oldest DNA on BBC iPlayer.
What I’m working on
A story somewhat related to the hunt for ancient DNA.
Graham Lawton is a staff writer at New Scientist and author of Mustn’t Grumble: The surprising science of everyday ailments. You can follow him @grahamlawton
