Name: 【TED】Ashton Cofer: A plan to recycle the unrecyclable (A plan to recycle the unrecyclable | Ashton Cofer)
Uploaded: 2017-12-19T03:43:29.000Z
Duration: 6 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

and I was in the basement playing video games.

And as I came upstairs to get something to drink,

and realized that there was something that I was supposed to be doing,

No, this wasn't my family's dinner on fire.

and it looked like our wooden deck was about to catch fire.

and of course my sister started recording a Snapchat video.

This was just the beginning of my team's science project.

My team is composed of me and three other students

which is an international LEGO robotics competition for kids,

we also worked on a separate science project,

and this was the project that we were working on.

a couple of my teammates took a trip to Central America

And when they came back and told us about it,

we really started thinking about the ways in which we see Styrofoam every day.

You end up with a block of Styrofoam bigger than the TV itself.

Well, those Styrofoam coffee cups are sure going to add up.

And where do all these items go after their one-time use?

Since there aren't any good existing solutions for used Styrofoam,

almost all of them end up right in the landfill,

produces over two billion pounds of Styrofoam,

filling up a staggering 25 percent of landfills.

So why do we have these ghost accumulations of Styrofoam waste?

Why can't we just recycle them like many plastics?

Well, simply put, recycled polystyrene is too expensive

so there is very little market demand for Styrofoam that has to be recycled.

And as a result, Styrofoam is considered a nonrenewable material,

because it is neither feasible nor viable to recycle polystyrene.

that simply ban the production of many products containing polystyrene,

all products that are very useful in today's society.

And now France has become the first country

But what if we could keep using Styrofoam

and keep benefiting from its cheap, lightweight, insulating

while not having to suffer from the repercussions

What if we could turn it into something else that's actually useful?

What if we could make the impossible possible?

My team hypothesized that we could use the carbon that's already in Styrofoam

which is used in almost every water filter today.

And activated carbon works by using very small micropores

to filter out contaminants from water or even air.

So we started out by doing a variety of heating tests,

most of our samples vaporized into nothing,

In fact, we were so saddened by our failures that we almost gave up.

when all the adults said it was impossible?

Well, maybe it's because we're kids. We don't know any better.

But the truth is, we kept trying because we thought it was still possible.

we would be helping the environment and making the world a better place.

With the right temperatures, times and chemicals,

we finally got that successful test result

showing us that we had created activated carbon from Styrofoam waste.

And at that moment, the thing that had been impossible

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【TED】Ashton Cofer: A plan to recycle the unrecyclable (A plan to recycle the unrecyclable | Ashton Cofer)

potentially

variety

freak

exist