Garbage Could Help Bring Well-Paying US Jobs, From Waste To Wealth In Manufacturing

The waste industry has not exactly been the most glamorous field to have a career, but it was a source of paying jobs. Thanks to a new process created by scientists, there could be thousands of additional employment opportunities in the market. It basically involves turning garbage into carbon fiber materials, which are used for various products.

US jobs are always at risk, but the threats to it are even more numerous now than it has been before. Aside from the matter of automation, there are also cases like the recent Chinese imports, which could endanger as many as 65,000 jobs in the US, CNBC reports.

As such, every industry needs to find a way to keep on creating more positions for Americans to fill, which is exactly what the discovery by scientists from the Texas A&M AgriLife Research can provide. What Dr. Joshua Yuan and his team found is that they can take waste products from both the paper and the plants industry, and use them to create base materials for manufacturing various products.

"We have overcome one of the industry's most challenging issues by discovering how to make good quality carbon fiber from waste," Dr. Yuan said. "People have been thinking about using lignin to make carbon fiber for many years, but achieving good quality has been an issue."

Lignin is basically the structural part of plants and about 50 million tons of it pile up in US dumping sites every single year, Phys.org reports. These lignin piles have been traditionally left to rot, which is basically throwing money into the fire.

By actually managing to create high-quality carbon fiber from lignin, the scientists are giving manufacturers the ability to get valuable materials from a nearly limitless resource. This could then lead to thousands of jobs in processing plants, provided the market actually capitalizes on the discovery.