The Potential of Nonwovens in Mitigating Climate Change Using Carbon Capture and Storage, Direct Air Capture and MOF-based Filters

Nonwoven-based filters play many roles in dealing with air pollution - from the humble vacuum cleaner in the home to extensive applications in industrial waste handling. Nonwoven-based filters also play an important role in reducing new emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Most recently, however, another potential strategy has been proposed for dealing with GHG emissions, namely carbon capture and storage (CCS), and nonwovens have an important role to play in this strategy too. More contentiously, direct air capture (DAC) has emerged as a further method of dealing with GHG emissions - by removing “legacy” carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions already in the atmosphere - and there is a promising future market for nonwovens in this application.

One of the companies at the forefront of DAC technology is Climeworks - headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. A Climeworks plant is capable of removing 4,000 tons a year of CO2 from the air on a land area of 1,700 m2. This is almost 1,000 times more effective than planting trees, as it would only be possible to host around 220 trees on the same area of land and these trees would only be capable of removing 4.62 tons of CO2 a year. Other companies at the forefront of DAC technology include 1PointFive, 3M, BASF, Carbon Blade, Holocene, Parallel Carbon and Yama.

There are a number of different DAC technologies for filtering CO2 from the air, and some of the most promising to have emerged in recent years are nanofibre nonwoven filters based on metal organic frameworks (MOFs). However, these nanofibre nonwoven filters would be required on a colossal scale should the DAC sector continue to build on the momentum it has gained in the past few years.

MOFs are also expected to contribute significantly to other areas of industrial decarbonisation in the coming years, including filtration and separation systems which exploit the special properties of MOFs. These areas are likely to include: chemical separation and purification processes; direct lithium extraction; improving HVAC filtration; and refrigeration reclamation. Companies leading innovations in these areas include AirJoule Technologies Corp, Daikin, EnergyX and UniSieve.