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Researchers have discovered that common plastics like polypropylene can effectively reflect specific UV light frequencies, aiding in cooling buildings through a process called radiative cooling. In today's email, we explain how this innovation can leverage readily available and recyclable plastics as a scalable and eco-friendly solution to climate control in hot regions.

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Household Plastics Can Be Used To Make "Smart" Walls for Regulating Building Temperature

When you feel yourself getting hot on a sunny day, you are actually feeling ultraviolet (UV) light hitting your skin. UV light is emitted from almost every heat source, and our sun throws out a lot of it. UV light is also one of the main factors that heat up our buildings. We have long known about the benefits of reflecting UV light; buildings in hot climates have had white roofs for thousands of years, a process known as radiative cooling.

But, reflecting UV light from a building’s vertical surfaces has always been much more difficult. This is because the heat reflected from UV light has to go somewhere. Roofs can shoot UV rays into the atmosphere or even space on a clear day, but walls reflect UV light at the objects around the buildings, like the ground. This often causes them to reabsorb the surrounding heat, canceling out any benefits from radiative cooling. Another problem with radiative cooling walls is that they can cause overcooling in the winter when the ground and surroundings are cold.

A new research paper released yesterday might have the answer to these problems. It turns out that UV light radiated back into the sky has a particular band of frequencies, known as the atmospheric transmission window. The researchers identified this range of UV light and experimented with what would happen if only this range were reflected by a building's vertical surface.

"By coating walls and windows with materials that only radiate or absorb heat in the atmospheric window, we can reduce broadband heat gain from the ground in the summer and loss in the winter while maintaining the cooling effect of the sky,” said Jyotirmoy Mandal, an assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton.

Even more exciting is that when they looked for materials with this particular property, they found that common plastic was very good at reflecting the right band of UV light. "We were really excited when we found that materials like polypropylene, which we sourced from household plastics, selectively radiate or absorb heat in the atmospheric window," Mandal noted. "These materials border on the mundane, but the same scalability that makes them common also means that we could see them thermoregulating buildings in the near future."

If rolled out at scale, this discovery could help cool buildings in hot climates without using any electricity. Plus, the plastic needed is not only cheap and readily available but can also be a destination for recycled plastic. So next time you use a plastic bottle, make sure it goes in the recycle bin because one day, it might be used to help keep your house cool.

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