Rice lab turns trash into valuable graphene in a flash

Date posted
Funding Agency
(Funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the U.S. Department of Energy)

Researchers at Rice University have discovered that virtually any source of solid carbon — from food scraps to old car tires — can be turned into graphene, which are sheets of carbon atoms prized for applications ranging from high-strength plastic to flexible electronics. Current techniques yield tiny quantities of picture-perfect graphene; the new method already produces grams per day of near-pristine graphene in the lab, and researchers are now scaling it up to kilograms. The researchers have already founded a startup company to commercialize their waste-to-graphene process.