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Mundo – Plastic Waste Water Harvesting: How Old CDs Pull Water From Desert Air (Intelligent Living)

21 de octubre de 2026

Fuente: Intelligent Living

Nota de: Aaron Jackson

Robert Woodward’s laboratory at the University of Vienna has a cupboard problem familiar to anyone who has ever cleared out a loft: scratched compact discs, yellowed polystyrene packaging, a crate of chipped plastic bricks.Rather than send them for downcycling, his team dissolved them in solvent, welded the polymer chains together, dosed the result with sulfuric acid, and produced a solid that drinks moisture straight out of the air.

The work, published in Chem Circularity, examines whether the plastic waste stream itself can serve as the raw material for a water-harvesting adsorbent. One of the resulting sponges, made from ordinary polystyrene of the kind used for single-use cutlery and CD cases, takes up close to 60% of its own weight in water from humid air and roughly 20% in desert-like conditions, then gives that water back when warmed by the sun.

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