Difference between revisions of "Team:Worldshaper-Nanjing/Description"

Background and Move

Increasing level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in earth's atmosphere is the main reason of global warming. As a result of human activity, atmospheric levels of CO2 have increased by ~25% over the past 150 years. Thus, it has become increasingly important to slow down the accumulation rate or reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in atmosphere. There are two main directions to address this problem: reducing the emissions at source or increasing sequestrations at downstream. Traditional carbon fixation technologies like chemical or physical adsorptions, membrane separations and cryogenic distillations are always high-cost and small scale, and believed to be not environmentally and economically sustainable. Photosynthetic organisms use solar energy to generate reducing equivalents and incorporate atmospheric CO2 into organic molecules is one of the main approaches in carbon cycle and carbon sequestration. Because of their limitation of living area and characteristics of metabolism, trees and other plants can only use carbon dioxide slowly and in a much smaller scale, however microalgae commonly known as “seaweed” have many advantages, like fast growing, vast living area(water area covers over more than 70% of the earth’s surface), higher photosynthetic efficiency and stronger capability of environmental adaptation, which make it to be a high efficiency, large scale, environment friendly and sustainable biological approach for carbon sequestration.