Your empty cuppa could capture carbon

Some of the amine groups hang out solo, while others link with each other to help create the porosity within the solid.

The researchers tested this process with a few plastic objects, including Styrofoam, food packaging, a fork, a CD case, and a Lego base plate (which has another chemical component). They found that the material they produced performed well in the carbon-capture cycle, both at the extremely high CO₂ concentration of a smokestack and the lower concentration of ambient air.

Multi-part figure with photos of polystyrene products and representations of the chemical structure of the resulting material and the carbon capture cycle. — Chemical structure of polystyrene with and without attached amines (NH₂ and NH), and an illustration of capturing and releasing carbon by controlling temperature.

Credit:

Ebenbauer, et al./Chem Circularity

Fine tuning

The researchers also found that they could control the material’s properties along the way. They could tune the amine content up or down, as well as adjusting the proportion that made porosity-building linkages instead of CO₂-grabbers.

Since the amine-containing starting material they used was ultimately fossil-fuel derived, they also tested turning a couple other kinds of synthetic materials into amines instead. Past research has shown a few pathways to do this, but those give you slightly more complicated forms of amines that may not be as reactive.

In this case, they used these amines in an upcycling reaction on urethane foam mattress material and decorative building trim. This worked, producing carbon-capture material made completely from waste, but the chunkier amine groups made from waste didn’t perform as well. Its capacity for CO₂ was lower, and it failed to sponge up CO₂ from ambient air.

But the polystyrene still held up its end of the bargain, and there’s a flexible blueprint here. With the right source and process for amines, carbon-capture material could be entirely produced from the flood of plastics going into landfills. And even if it’s only half produced from plastics, that would still be improvement. This could both provide a market to redirect some of the plastic waste and technically reduce the carbon footprint of carbon capture (although the vast majority of its footprint is the energy required to run the process.)

Carbon capture isn’t a license to keep using fossil fuels. It’s an additional action we can take to rein in atmospheric CO₂ more quickly. And the more sustainably you can run that process, the better it is.

Chem Circularity, 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.checir.2026.100027 (About DOIs).

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