It’s morning and you wake on a comfortable foam mattress made partly from greenhouse gas. You pull on a T-shirt and sneakers containing carbon dioxide pulled from factory emissions. After a good run, you stop for a cup of joe and guiltlessly toss the plastic cup in the trash, confident it will fully biodegrade into harmless organic materials. At home, you squeeze shampoo from a bottle that has lived many lifetimes, then slip into a dress fashioned from smokestack emissions. You head to work with a smile, knowing your morning routine has made Earth’s atmosphere a teeny bit carbon cleaner.
Sound like a dream? Hardly. These products are already sold around the world. And others are being developed. They’re part of a growing effort by academia and industry to reduce the damage caused by centuries of human activity that has sent CO2 and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere (SN: 3/12/22, p. 16).