A new material that prevents plastic from ageing has been developed by CSIRO – offering huge environmental and cost savings for the energy industry.
When applied to plastic lining this ‘botox for plastic’ can clean up exhaust gases from power plants much more effectively than existing methods.
Currently, the techniques industry use to separate out raw materials such as gases, liquids and solids are extremely energy-intensive, accounting for 40 per cent of the world’s energy use each year.
According to lead author Dr Sam Lau, the new ‘botox’ technique offers a solution that will make the separation process a staggering 50 times faster.
“At the moment power generators rely on plastic linings made up of tiny holes just one nanometre wide, a tiny fraction of a width of a human hair,