C-Cycle

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Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and so a major environmental pollutant. Energy production produces vast volumes of the gas that is released in to the atmosphere. While carbon dioxide is taken up by plants and converted into useful chemical building blocks such as sugars, deforestation, increasing urbanisation and an ever increasing demand to energy means that the carbon dioxide cycle is becoming increasingly unbalanced. Furthermore, global oil and gas supplies are decreasing at an alarming rate and these are the feedstocks of the energy and petrochemicals industries.In this project which is located at eight top UK universities, we intend to capture some of the carbon dioxide produced in industrial processes and reconvert it into chemical feedstocks using advanced materials technology and specifically designed catalysts. The aim is to develop a sustainable carbon economy through efficient recycling of waste materials: the C-Cycle. Recent UK government initiatives have placed the emphasis for waste management in the hands of the municipal incinerators (which produce carbon dioxide) with a move away from the environmentally harmful landfill that are used in many regions. Not only will this project directly address UK government policy in waste management, it will take it one step further by producing high value products from the process: as the saying goes where there's muck there's brass! .