Abstract
Humic acid, as a natural organic matter, is widely distributed in surface soil, oceans, rivers, and other ecological environments throughout the whole earth ecosystem. Humic acid provides abundant organic carbon and helps to maintain a hydrated, pH and redox buffered environment hosting the soil microbiome. Humic acid is however also a largely ignored polymer material full of exciting functional properties, and its scale is enormous. This perspective article discusses its synthesis and management as a tool to tackle parts of the climate crisis as well its use in technological applications, as made by chemical conversion of agricultural side products to artificial humic acids.
Highlights
The organic matter fraction in the geological carbon pool. As another important fact for discussion is, photosynthesis of land plants immobilizes more than 220 billion tons of CO2 per year globally,[6] these correspond to an uptake of 27.8 peris unimaginably big: it contains an estimated 1016 tons of mille atmospheric CO2 per year in absolute units
Soil thereby contains by far more carbon than carbon ends up throughout natural processes in soil carbon, as the atmosphere, it is the most impor- dead plant matter is mostly metabolized, tant player in the global carbon cycle,[4] literally mostly unseen with little remainders left to form the soil carbon pool
CN&E in a cover story nicely compacted the Talking about soil carbon as a chemical product of tool thereby whole context in a single quote by Debbie Barker: “We have human chemical activities in energy and chemistry, just that a huge potential carbon sink below our feet, and we are not we do not actively do it
Summary
As another important fact for discussion is, photosynthesis of land plants immobilizes more than 220 billion tons of CO2 per year globally,[6] these correspond to an uptake of 27.8 peris unimaginably big: it contains an estimated 1016 tons of mille atmospheric CO2 per year in absolute units The wish to create a sustainable chemistry and to tackle the climate crisis actively will move HAs out of the classical soil context and to applications in chemical technology and for remediation. This is what this perspective article is about. HA as extracted by standard protocols from soil is a complex polymer compound that contains acidic carboxyl and phenolate groups. A scheme of the general structure is illustrated in Scheme 1
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