It charges like a battery and breathes like a lung — a new device pulls carbon straight from open air

Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working with Toyota, have built a device that borrows its tricks from rechargeable batteries to pull carbon dioxide directly out of open air. Instead of the costly heating step most air-capture machines rely on, it runs on electricity: current flowing one way through a saltwater cell makes the water absorb carbon dioxide, and reversing the current releases the gas in pure form for storage. The work, published in Environmental Science & Technology, is still at the lab stage, but it points to a cheaper, easier-to-scale way of clearing out the carbon already hanging in the sky.

SDG 13 · Climate action — Mechanism: tech innovation