Burning your pockets for those cases is no more for the sheer love of it. Buying smartphone cases can now reduce ones carbon footprint. Enter Newlight Technologies, a California based company that swears to cast smartphone cases from plastic made out of Greenhouse gases. They have proposed to use a “biocatalyst” machine that would take in the GHG’s and turn them in to plastic pellets.
The technology dubbed AirCarbon promises to reduce the Greenhouse gas percentage and also the usage of petrol in producing plastic. This might mark the entry of Eco-plastic that would be more cheaper and reliable than oil-based plastic. The net result could be a “whole new paradigm for how plastics impact the world”, says Mark Herrema, Newlight’s co-founder and chief executive.
“We harness carbon from greenhouse gas and use it as a resource to make materials that are as strong as oil-based plastics but less expensive”, he adds.
The effort has been welcomed and kick started by US telecommunications firm Sprint that has announced on launching an iphone 5 and iphone 5S case made of the revolutionary plastic.
The technology works by first isolating carbon from the industrial emissions of Greenhouse gases and then reassembling the carbon particles from the carbon heavy air to form long polymeric chains that have more stronger bonds than the conventional ones.
Sprint’s director for corporate responsibility and sustainability, Amy Hargroves stated that the smartphone case industry is burgeoning and can be tapped easily for the initial ventures that would ultimately decide the future for AirCarbon.
Dell has also taken notice of the promising stuff from Newlight Technologies, and has showed interest in producing packaging sleeves for its Latitude series notebooks made of Eco-plastic. Hargroves predicts that the acceptance of the technology will broad in a decade saying, “If you can get to the point where it is less expensive that other options, it has environmental benefits and it has the same quality, it should become the obvious choice.”