• Question: How easy would it be to make plastic from fruit peel in home environment? Citric Acid is easily extracted, and pure carbon is easily found/created. Does this mean a 'sloppy' version is possible.

    Asked by Joe to Laura on 10 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      In theory you could extract the citric acid at home, but sadly you wouldn’t be able to run the process I use to transform it into plastic at home. It uses really high temperatures (260 degrees Celsius) and super high pressures (200 times the pressure on earth!) so we couldn’t really do that without specialist equipment.

Comments

  • Photo: Joe

    Joe commented on :

    So, the structure of the materials involved change? Such as coal and diamonds? What would happen with different structures?

  • Photo: Laura

    Laura commented on :

    Not exactly like coal and diamond. The high temperature provides enough energy to break the bonds in citric acid to release CO2 and the pressure is mainly there to keep the water in it’s liquid state. If we heat water above it’s boiling point (100 °C) to 260 °C, the water molecules go into the vapour state and want to be really far apart from each other. So we need to pressurise the vessel to push all of the water molecules closer together to stay as a liquid.