Can recycled gloves grab carbon dioxide?

The world is facing a climate crisis and a plastic waste crisis. Aarhus University chemist Troels Skrydstrup and his team think there might be a way to address both problems at once.“We need millions of tons of [carbon capture] materials” to meet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s expected need for carbon dioxide removal, Skrydstrup says. Meanwhile, the world produces over 400 million metric tons of plastic every year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Perhaps, Skrydstrup wondered, some of that “enormous amount of material that we don't know what to do with” can somehow be converted to carbon-capturing materials.Skrydstrup and his team recently debuted their efforts to turn nitrile rubber, of the kind used in laboratory and medical gloves, into polyamine membranes that sequester carbon dioxide (Chem 2026, DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2025.102918).Many carbon capture systems rely on amines that nab CO2 molecules to form carbamates and bicarbonates. Nitrile rubber was an obvious starting point for upcycling, because nitrile groups can be turned into amines in a single hydrogenation reaction.Postdoctoral fellow Simon Kildahl screened a variety of catalysts for their ability to hydrogenate nitrile-butadiene rubber. He ultimately landed on a commercially available ruthenium pincer complex as the most efficient for converting the cross-linked rubber found in lab gloves.Kildahl also investigated procedures for installing additional nitrile groups through hydrocyanation on the polymer’s carbon-carbon double bonds before the hydrogenation step. Hydrocyanation also opened the possibility of starting with styrene butadiene-styrene rubber, found in a variety of products, including shoe soles.The real test, Kildahl