More on the work at Cornell University, wherein they are recycling Carbon Dioxide into very useful plastics.
Some excerpts from the enclosed link to Researcher Geoffrey Coates group::
"Polymers from Renewable Resources"
(Yes, they are referring - as we've suggested we all should - to Carbon Dioxide as a renewable resource. - JtM)
"Carbon dioxide is an ideal synthetic feedstock since it is abundant, inexpensive, nontoxic, and nonflammable. Although it is estimated that Nature uses CO2 to make over 200 billion tons of glucose by photosynthesis each year, synthetic chemists have had embarrassing little success in developing efficient catalytic processes that exploit this attractive raw material. There has been considerable recent interest in the development of catalysts for the alternating copolymerization of carbon dioxide with epoxides to produce aliphatic polycarbonates. Due to the low cost and accessibility of the monomers and the attractive properties of polycarbonates, the development of new, efficient initiators for this polymerization process is a significant scientific goal. We have recently discovered a new class of well-defined, highly active zinc-based catalysts that copolymerize carbon dioxide and epoxides under exceptionally mild conditions. These catalysts are remarkable since they are several orders of magnitude more active than the current commercial catalysts. Current research is directed toward determining the mechanism of this new catalyst system, and the development of chiral catalyst systems for stereoselective polymerization. More recently, we have discovered the first cobalt catalysts for CO2 epoxide polymerization. These catalysts exhibit unprecedented activities."