Disposable nitrile rubber gloves are produced in staggering numbers every year, and most of them are thrown away after just one use. The result is an enormous and growing stream of waste.
A new lab study suggests a different ending for this material. Instead of burning or burying the rubber, researchers can transform it into a solid that captures CO2 and can be reused repeatedly.
The idea is simple but ambitious: to take a product currently treated as a disposal problem and turn it into a tool for emissions control.
From rubber gloves to CO2 capture
In the study, Simon Kildahl, a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, and his colleagues report a method for converting waste rubber gloves into a CO2 adsorbent.
Kildahl argues that this shift could matter because so much of this material exists – and because incineration remains a common fate for mixed or hard-to-recycle plastics.
“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 is part of the Skydstrup Group under the Novo Nordisk Foundation CO2 Research Center (CORC), a collaboration headquartered at Aarhus University.
The broader mission is to find ways to capture CO2 or convert it into useful products, including fuels made through Power-to-X processes.
That focus on carbon capture connects with another theme the group has pursued for years: what to do with materials that are typically considered unrecyclable.
The researchers previously reported ways to recover value from polyurethane foam from mattresses and from wind turbine blade waste such as epoxy and glass fibers.
Now they’re applying similar thinking to nitrile rubber gloves, which sit in an uncomfortable category: essential for healthcare, widely used, and usually disposed of immediately.
The appeal of the new approach is that it tries to solve two problems at once. It offers a route for a difficult waste stream, and it creates a product that could help reduce emissions rather than add to them.
Chemistry reshapes rubber waste
The lab method begins with a simple mechanical step: breaking the gloves down into smaller pieces. After that, chemistry takes over.
“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.”
The researchers are not simply melting and remolding the gloves. They are chemically transforming the material so it behaves differently and takes on a new role.
Rubber gloves become a CO2 sponge
The team tested the material using simulated flue gas. That detail matters because industrial exhaust streams contain complex gas mixtures, not pure CO2.
There is also a practical feature that makes the idea more than a one-time trick. After the material captures CO2, researchers can regenerate it.
When engineers heat the rubber-based product, it releases the captured CO2 so they can send the gas for underground storage or use it in Power-to-X processes. At the same time, the material refreshes itself and becomes ready to capture new CO2.
That ability to cycle through capture and release is essential for any realistic carbon capture technology. If the material degraded quickly or worked only once, the waste problem would simply reappear in a different form.
Rethinking carbon capture materials
CO2 capture is not new. Established technologies already pull carbon dioxide from exhaust streams and even directly from the air.
What makes Kildahl’s team’s work different is not the goal but the starting material.
Most capture materials require significant upstream production, and much of that manufacturing still depends on fossil feedstocks. If a climate solution relies on ramping up oil-based production, its overall benefit can shrink.
Rubber waste becomes climate resource
Instead of producing a new material from scratch, the researchers begin with waste that would otherwise end up in landfills or incinerators.
They frame the glove-based material as a way to avoid adding more fossil inputs to the system. The approach also connects to the scale of the challenge outlined by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has pointed to the need to remove billions of tons of CO2 annually 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 broader pitch behind the chemistry. The glove becomes a carbon-capture resource rather than a carbon-emitting liability and the process aims to keep new fossil inputs to a minimum.
Early stages, big ambitions
For now, the results remain confined to the laboratory – and that is not a minor caveat. Many reactions perform beautifully in small glassware but behave very differently when engineers attempt to run them at industrial scale.
Kildahl places the project in the early-to-middle stages on the Technology Readiness Level scale – around level three or four.
The team is currently working on a gram scale. The next challenge is moving toward kilogram-scale runs, where heat transfer, mixing, and cost constraints become far more difficult to manage.
“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 another hurdle. The method currently relies on an expensive catalyst. Any practical pathway would require either a cheaper alternative, far better recycling of the catalyst, or a redesigned process that reduces the amount needed.
Still, the researchers argue they have crossed an important threshold: the method works in principle. The team is now working to make the material more robust, affordable, and competitive with other carbon capture technologies.
The team has already proven the concept works and believes the technology could move to more advanced development stages soon if they can improve scalability, lower costs, and boost performance.
The study is published in the journal CHEM.
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