This sponge sucks oil spills right out of the ocean | Hard Reset

“A new wave of material sciences could help us start cleaning the environment instead of just, well, using it as a trash can.”

No matter what your take on fossil fuels or renewable energy is – we can all agree that oil spills are not great, and we need a better way to clean them up.

Right now, to clean up the thousands of oil spills that happen each year in the United States, we mainly just set them on fire. It's called an in-situ burn. You get it so it's thick enough on top of the water that you can strike a flame and it'll actually just burn away.

But what if you could pull that oil out - and use it? And what if we might all be sitting on the solution? A new wave of material sciences could help us start cleaning the environment instead of just well, using it as a trash can. It turns out just one super common material, with a few atomic modifications, can clean up oil spills better than anything else we’ve got.

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Read more of our stories on oil spills:
Sun-powered soft robot could mop up the seas
Autonomous trash-eating boats clean up water pollution
This magnetic sponge may be the key to oil spill cleanup
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Watch our original series:

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[clintwolf]

We could redirect the fines imposed on the "spillers" to fund this potential solution. If it isn't sufficient funding, raise the fines.

I love how the "sponges" are reusable (squish out the oil that is picked up, then re-submerge the material for the next loop). This means we don't need to mass produce these at the same scale than if they were single-use items. Also extremely valuable is that the oil can be reused instead of just burned or dumped somewhere else. It's not great that we'll eventually be using the recovered oil to burn in our vehicles, but it is better than just burning it on the ocean surface.

[NathanDrake_]

I am amazed that, the recovered oil can be sold again; but still no big companies are coming forward.

[manuperez]

come on youtube, this is important, do it viral

[kenji]

This channel deserves more subscribers and views

[katzda]

That's great, wish they received a donation or some help they need to scale up

[willm]

Maybe we should work on the root cause of all these oil spills?

[beebee]

I like the non profit company that uses large swaths of human hair to soak up oil spills. It doesn’t kill ocean life and doesn’t require a team of scientists to build a patented and profit-oriented product.

[jamesmetzger]

If the problem with making them larger is how far into the material the coating can go. Why not make it thinner so it doesn't need to be received from all sides to go all the way through.

[moweME]

It's a shame how many cool hard reset ideas there are out in the wild, but no one producing these things.

[BonatheBanana]

thank you for the information for my poster

[mgalyean]

This is excellent. Now we could not only cleanup spills better, but also harvest oil from natural oil seeps. This is about 500, 000 barrels per year from the Gulf of Mexico alone.

[Ashallmusica]

Let's be straight, government burn Fossil fuels because Citizens need energy so much in a regular basis that shifting or changing the use of Fossil fuel is the costly decision. Means, it's not We Can't but we Won't, ever. It's our Behaviour that we speak about this topic so much yet few of us were able to think about Execute the conspiracy.

[MegaEmmanuel]

1:09 Thousands of oil spills by one country alone?? Well, maybe they'd stop spilling it if it wasn't so damn slippery!

[Ich_hab_Fernweh]

yeah lets produce more non degradable plastics to Capture oil spills so we can produce more non degradable non recyclable stuff sounds rly smart

[robbiekavanagh]

The problem is just that vapour deposition is an expensive process which doesn't scale well. There's nothing special about polyurethane foam other than the fact that it's cheap and has a lot of surface area. Human hair is oleophilic as well and there are companies who take donations of hair to make 'mats' which they float on oil spills to perform the same function. They're oleophilic with lots of surface area and they float. Maybe the oil from hair mats isn't reusable though?

[tigredroyce]

I suppose oi is still too cheap, that this idea isn't economically profitable to produce in bigger scale. Maybe that is the reason the big oil companies are not interested in it. What a shame.

[whitenoise]

Let's stop burning the oil when it spills. That way, we can save it for something else and burn the oil.

[JamesVestal-dzqm]

It's a plug flow reactor? I like learning about membranes on cells. They have hydrophilic phosphate groups and hydrophobic carbon chains. We need protein for the phosphorus and fat for the carbon chain. Lots of ion pumps produce osmotic pressures to drive water with nutrients dissolved to go where they need to go in the cell. It's overwhelming how complex our bodies are when deciding what to do with my time.

[DarkGT]

It's great to be prepared with this new methods, but I'm asking why we are thinking of new ways to deal with oils spills and not of how to stop using oil at all? This oil was going to be burned anyway, as petrol in your cars. It's great not to pollute, but the oil is still causing pollution, everyday all around us.

[recluseax]

this sponge is lot better than burning the oil