Disposable nitrile rubber gloves could become a CO2 capture material

Disposable nitrile rubber gloves are manufactured in vast quantities each year, yet the overwhelming majority are discarded after a single use. That pattern creates a huge - and still expanding - waste stream.

A recent laboratory study points to an alternative fate for this material. Rather than being burned or buried, the rubber can be converted into a solid that adsorbs CO2 and can be used again and again.

The aim is straightforward but far-reaching: to turn a product currently treated as a disposal headache into a practical instrument for emissions control.

From rubber gloves to CO2 capture

In the study, Simon Kildahl, a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, and colleagues describe a route for turning discarded rubber gloves into a CO2 adsorbent.

Kildahl says the change matters because the material is so widely available - and because incineration is still a common endpoint for mixed plastics or plastics that are difficult to recycle.

“A plastic bottle can be recycled relatively easily, as we know from deposit-return systems,” he said. “But other plastic materials are problematic because they cannot be reused in the same way. Therefore, they often end up being burned, which is currently the case for rubber gloves.”

“In our experiments, we converted the glove so that it could capture CO2 instead of becoming a waste product that releases CO2 and other harmful gases during incineration.”

Tackling hard-to-recycle plastics

Kildahl works within the Skydstrup Group at the Novo Nordisk Foundation CO2 Research Center (CORC), a collaboration based at Aarhus University.

The centre’s wider goal is to develop ways to capture CO2 or transform it into valuable outputs, including fuels produced via Power-to-X processes.

That carbon-capture agenda also aligns with a long-running interest in the group: finding productive uses for materials generally viewed as unrecyclable.

Earlier work from the researchers has described approaches to recover value from polyurethane mattress foam and from wind turbine blade waste, including epoxy and glass fibres.

They are now extending the same thinking to nitrile rubber gloves - a material in an awkward position: indispensable in healthcare, used at scale, and typically disposed of straight away.

The attraction of the approach is that it attempts to address two issues simultaneously. It provides an outlet for a challenging waste stream while producing something that could cut emissions rather than contribute to them.

Chemistry reshapes rubber waste

The laboratory process starts with a basic physical step: the gloves are broken into smaller fragments. From there, the transformation is driven by chemistry.

“Specifically, we shred the rubber glove into small pieces. It then reacts with a ruthenium-based catalyst and hydrogen gas, after which it can capture CO2 from simulated flue gas,” Kildahl explained. “In the real world, this could potentially take place at a power plant.”

This is not a matter of melting and remoulding the gloves. Instead, the team chemically alters the material so that it takes on different properties and a new purpose.

Rubber gloves become a CO2 sponge

To assess performance, the team exposed the new material to simulated flue gas - an important point, because real industrial exhaust is a complex blend of gases rather than pure CO2.

A further practical aspect is that the material is designed to be reused. After it adsorbs CO2, the researchers can regenerate it.

When engineers heat the rubber-derived product, it releases the captured CO2, allowing the gas to be directed to underground storage or fed into Power-to-X processes. At the same time, the material is refreshed and can be used for another round of CO2 capture.

This ability to repeat capture and release is central to any viable carbon-capture system. If the material broke down rapidly or functioned only once, the same waste challenge would simply re-emerge in a different guise.

Rethinking carbon capture materials

CO2 capture itself is not a new concept. Mature technologies already remove carbon dioxide from exhaust gases and even capture it directly from the air.

What distinguishes the work from Kildahl’s team is not the objective, but the feedstock.

Many CO2-capture materials require substantial upstream production, and much of that manufacturing still relies on fossil-based inputs. If a climate measure depends on expanding oil-derived production, the overall benefit can be reduced.

Rubber waste becomes climate resource

Rather than manufacturing a new capture medium from the beginning, the researchers start with waste that might otherwise be landfilled or incinerated.

They present the glove-based material as a way to avoid introducing additional fossil inputs, and they link the idea to the scale of the task highlighted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has indicated that billions of tonnes of CO2 per year will need to be removed by mid-century.

“That is why it is smart to utilize a waste material available in such large quantities, rather than extracting more oil from the ground,” Kildahl said.

“With the rubber glove, we can create a CO2 capture material where almost every atom in the product comes from waste, except for a small amount of hydrogen.”

That is the central argument behind the chemistry: gloves are reframed as a carbon-capture resource instead of a carbon-emitting liability, while the process is intended to keep new fossil-derived inputs as low as possible.

Early stages, big ambitions

At present, the findings are limited to the laboratory - and that limitation is significant. Many reactions perform extremely well in small-scale glassware, yet behave very differently when scaled for industrial operation.

Kildahl places the work in the early-to-middle portion of the Technology Readiness Level scale - roughly level three or four.

The experiments are currently being run on a gram scale. The next step is to reach kilogram-scale operation, where issues such as heat transfer, mixing and cost constraints become much harder to control.

“We are working on a gram scale right now, and reactions can look and behave differently when we scale up to kilograms. But our results look very promising,” he said.

Making the CO2 capture affordable

Cost is a further barrier. The current approach depends on an expensive catalyst. Any realistic route forward would require a lower-cost substitute, much more effective catalyst recycling, or a redesigned process that reduces the quantity required.

Even so, the researchers say they have achieved a key milestone: the concept works in principle. The next push is to make the material tougher, cheaper and able to compete with other carbon-capture options.

The team says it has already demonstrated that the idea functions, and expects the technology could progress to more advanced development stages if scalability, cost and performance can be improved.