Graphene Grown From Girl Scout Cookies

A single box of Girl Scout Cookies could yield $15 billion worth of graphene says chemist James Tour and graduate students from Rice University.

Professor Tour, graduate students Zhiwei Peng, Zhengzong Sun, and Gedeng Ruan published a paper on ASC Nano explaining how graphene can be developed from anything that contains carbon, even a cockroach leg.

Graphene is a tough material known for being an efficient heat and electricity conductor usable in electronics, exist in one-atom-thick sheets. It is also highly expensive, selling at $250 for a 2-inch square, because only pure carbon sources and organic gasses had been used to produce graphene before, according to the study published in the journal ASC Nano.

The experiment to turn Girl Scout Cookies into graphene started on a dare after Tour stated at a meeting he and his team successfully created graphene from sugar. “I said we could grow it from any carbon source—for example, a Girl Scout cookie, because Girl Scout Cookies were being served at the time,” Tour stated in a Rice University press release. “So one of the people in the room said, ‘Yes, please do it. ... Let’s see that happen.’”

To demonstrate their discovery, they invited members of Girl Scout Troop 25080 to Rice’s Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology to view the process of growing graphene from a box of shortbread Girl Scout Cookies.

Several low-cost carbon sources including chocolate, grass, and plastic were put on the backside of copper foil under a 1,050 degrees Celsius burner, and all the materials successfully produced high-quality graphene.

Ruan and Sun estimated a full box of cookies could produce enough graphene to cover 30 football fields, with a commercial value of $15 billion.

Since the material’s high value is based on its rarity, however, Tour predicts the price of graphene will drop as soon as companies learn this technique and produce mass amounts using cheap raw material.