Giving Compass' Take:

· Sangwon Suh, a professor in University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses a new strategy to use carbon dioxide as a carbon source through carbon capture and utilization to produce plastics and chemicals.

· What is carbon capture and utilization (CCU)? Is it a realistic idea? What other ways can we limit the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? 

· Here's how we can reduce greenhouse emission with four steps.

Chemical production emits staggering amounts of greenhouse gases via the energy it consumes and the carbon-based raw materials it uses. According to the findings, chemical production—which encompasses sectors as diverse as lubricants, paints, and plastics—accounts for over 3.3 billion metric tons of CO2 per year, or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases.

Sangwon Suh, a professor in University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, recently released a comprehensive account of carbon emissions from plastics, in which he and his coauthor discovered that plastics alone account for the equivalent of 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions per year.

“On the one hand, this massive quantity of plastic and chemicals poses a problem,” says Suh, who researches industrial ecology, “because a huge amount of energy is needed in production and, once the products are used, a huge amount of waste will be generated.”

Read the full article about CO2 emissions by Harrison Tasoff at Futurity.