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Turning Garbage into Gold
bart_scriv writes "Entrepreneurs are creating companies that exploit the creative opportunities in other people's junk, sparing the environment in the process. The article looks at green entrepreneurship in general and profiles some specific companies, whose products range from recycled printer cartridges to rubber sidewalks. It also includes a slideshow on the process of making rubber sidewalks. From the article: 'While innovation has always been the entrepreneur's trademark, a growing interest in the green movement is propelling small business owners to create new products and services that also happen to be inventive recycling solutions for the country's vast waste heaps. 'The sustainability and restoring of our environment are providing opportunities in many fields of small business,' says John Stayton, co-founder and director of the Green MBA program at San Francisco's New College of California.'"
So what are they going to turn Linux into?
I was hoping for something relatively cool in the rubber sidewalk slide show - instead, all I got is some shots of ground up rubber and a very ho-hum sidewalk paver install. *yawn*
The bags made out of old inner tubes cost way more than similar bags imported from China and sold at Walmart.
The trick to recycling is to do so in an economic manner.
Ewaste is poisoning our water. Each TV has a lot of lead, and my provinces' IT equipment collection program set to start in 2007 won't take TVs until 2008 at the earliest. It's good that some places are capitalizing now on all of our misfortune.
eWastecanada.ca is a local business mining for gold.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
"'The sustainability and restoring of our environment are providing opportunities in many fields of small business,'"
I'm going to do my part and recycle all my comments from now on.
Yes, I'm talking about Slashdot.
I have a feeling that in 10 years or so it will be economicly feasable to strip mine old landfills than to go mining for raw ore. Generational recycling and reclamation, if you will.
Be a pal, bless my server.
The Mr. Fusion already produces 1.21 jiggawatts of electricity. They are about 18 years too late.
Very little of recycling is anything but very wasteful. Penn and Teller did an episode of their show "Bullshit!" about it and it was quite illuminating. In terms of energy costs and such, the only time recycling ever turns a benefit is in the case of aluminum cans. Everything else is a huge waste. Especially paper, since all of our paper comes from tree farms specifically grown to supply paper. You're not killing acres of forest when you throw out paper, you're probably planting a new tree.
And don't get me started on the fact that plastics only last 1000 years in a dump if you bury it like an idiot. Plastics are photosensitive and will decay rapidly if just left where they can get sunlight.
This is ridiculous. All this is is people finding a way to make money. Nothing new. It just so happens that they're using waste from other businesses. It has been happening in one form or another for as long as any semblance of free markets have existed. There's a niche, and people are filling it. These aren't people out to save the world. These are people out to save a buck, and the way that they do it happens to recycle scrap. Big fucking deal.
You mean other than eBay? ^_^
Thus proving the age old adage that one man's trash is another man's VC funding.
I've got a new idea involving the re-arrangement of the letters in dupe articles into a new summary of something that hasn't been covered yet. I'm kind of new to text processing languages, perhaps someone could help me out. Basically it'd accept a dupe article and use recycle the data into a more useful form. Even if new articles couldn't be produced, perhaps the bits could be used to make the filler gradient graphics. It might be kind of grainy, perhaps useful for older systems that only have 8-bit color. Anyway, just an idea I had while reading this (non-dupe) article summary.
The problem is that you are thinking in terms of energy and not raw materials. Depending on where the energy is coming from, using more in recycling vs. production may not be a problem. If the raw materials are in limited supply or dumping space is limited, the recycling still makes sense if you can recycle significant quantities. Although I didn't watch the Bullshit episode.They may have covered more than just the energy aspect.
The paper issue is interesting though because you might consider discarded paper as a carbon sink.
As for not burying plastic... What do you suggest we do with it? Fill desert areas with trash? What kind of chemicals does decaying plastic leave behind?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Not true. From our experience (in Brazil), this monoculture aproach using non-native species leads to as much wildlife wipeout and soil/underground water spoiling as the damned "Queimadas", wich is the practice of burning the forest to give way to soybean crops and/or bovine pasture.
Works on college move-outs. All the reusable trash thrown out -- clothes, furniture, random stuff -- gets collected, sorted, and sold back to students and the community in the fall, proceeds generally going to the groups (student groups, charities, etc.) that provided the labor. Called Dump and Run. You will realize that anyone with a sign on the street for "large yardsale" does not know what they're talking about when you sell several tons of stuff for thousands of dollars. The sales I've been involved with are talking about a dozen tons for over $5 grand and they're for a school of under 2000 undergrads.
I think you've nailed the idea. It's not just energy ROI. You have to consider the costs of disposing of the trash as well, as people don't want loads of trash sitting around and certainly not getting imported from places where there's no room. It's why recycling doesn't make as much sense in the midwest as on the coasts -- it's reflected in the tipping fees you pay for trash. Here in MA we pay about $85-120/ton to dump trash, plus hauling fees. In the midwest and southwest it's down around $30. So recycling makes sense, you just have to think in a bigger picture. Cost diversion rather than energy savings, material reuse vs. the energy needed to refine it, lots of jobs (recycling supports about 19,000 jobs in MA alone) vs. lots of landfills.
and how, exactly, is the lead getting out of the glass?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hey, maybe they'll start paying me to take my trash!
(This post's captcha is "fictions". Irony or prescience?)
The problem with your logic is that the tree you just "planted" by throwing out paper (wtf?), is not going to provide: shade or habitat or prevent erosion or breathe in a comparable amount of carbon dioxide. There are lots of other externalities you've neglected to account for, such as the chemical treatment it takes to produce paper pulp from wood (more so than recycled pulp). Nobody counts that because it gets dumped into the air, oceans and rivers.
According to some reports, many of North America's largest catalogs and tissue product manufacturers use virgin boreal pulp.
Often in managed forests, where, as you triumphantly declare: trees are "specifically grown to supply paper", the trees that have been planted are not indigenous to the region. This endangers native plant and animal species, such as in Chile.
Well, he already found his way to make money with his "Green MBA program". Although, I guess it's not really in the spirit of the message.
I used to buy freight damaged medical supplies and we did ok for awhile.
:(
:(
:(
;/
i had a 3000+ sq ft warehouse full at one point but too many problems
Other wholesalers/retailers were only interested in the particular product number they normally used even if something was equal or simply a different package quantity.
Soon even the charities didnt want odd quantities or small lots, they wanted pallets of gloves and money. By that point all our excess had to be put in garbage.
Between storing it, sorting it and paying to throw away the truely damaged stuff (only like 10% but it adds up quick) and now paying to throw away the odd stuff we didnt have end users for (another 25%) it got too expensive to salvage anything
Now most of it goes in trash even tho more than half is perfectly useable merchandise that doesnt even need reprocessing
And for one of the other comments, we dont recycle computer stuff here either. I just called the waste co to ask what to do with CRT....just toss it in trash. We use an incinerator in this county, they burn CRTs ?!?
recycling is hard...
General recycling/waste should be under contract to prisons. It gets dumped and sorted there where they can pay em pennies and keepp ppl busy. Stuff could be disasembled and recycled more.
Oh well, i guess we will dig up the landfills someday when we need the raw materials bad enough.
Oh yeah, article was fairly lame like most. More dressing than meat and potatoes
2-10 lbs of lead?
I find that very difficult do believe. I mean that's 5-25 POUNDS of solder. What the hell are they doing in there?
The heaviest thing in a television set is the picture tube. Since it's big and filled with vacuum it must have very thick walls. Thick glass walls. I suppose they could be lead crystal glass tubes, but that would be needlessly expensive, and wouldn't leach into the water supply in any meaningful timescale anyway. The next heaviest thing is the hundreds of wrappings of thin copper wire. There is no reason to ever make thin copper wire out of lead. In fact, it's impossible.
That figure smacks of taking advantage of people's ignorance about a heavy rarely opened box in almost everyone's homes. There's gotta be some kind of term for abusing people's uncertainty about things to encourage fear to promote some kind of crazy agenda.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The trick to recycling is to do so in an economic manner.
The trick to dealing with waste is; don't. Perhaps you've heard an aphorism that begins with that word, but as such you are the only one who makes money on the deal (there's another aphorism that deals with pennies), so you'll never hear the concept advertised.
Read Brave New World for the argumentum ad adsurdum.
KFG
"the chemical treatment it takes to produce paper pulp from wood "
and what about the chemical treatment to recycle paper?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Such an appropriately named show. They are so full of bullshit its amazing. Do a little research on your own instead of just taking pen and tellers biased presentation of what they want you to hear as fact.
Ok, but let me simplify the equation for you a bit. For the forseeable future (as in, as long as you'll be alieve at least) the energy comes from fossil fuels. Either oil, coal, or natural gas.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
All hail Nostradamus
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
It is true that some forestry practices were very bad. It is also true that old pulp plants were horrendous polluters. I've spent a lot of time in mill towns. In one case, the town dump smelled better than the downtown area.
Modern forestry practices are no worse for the environment than what mother nature does. Remember that Mother Nature tends to use forest fires as part of her tool kit. Modern pulp mills aren't particularly polluting.
Compared to old practices, recycling paper was good for the environment. Now it's not such an open and shut case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry
I call bullshit. Biodegradable plastics that decay with exposure to sunlight exist but have proven too expensive to manufacture for general use. Biodegradable plastics also tend to release carbon into the atmosphere. The plastics we use do not "decay rapidly" if just left in sunlight. Even if the coke bottle disappears, the plastic is still there.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I've thought this for a while as well; we're dumping so much of our material wealth into landfill, what happens when we run out? Maybe at that point, the only thing left will be glass and disposable nappies (diapers) :)
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Really? I'm pretty sure the electricity I use comes from hydropower. But maybe those big ol' dams are just for show.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The following is from Wikipedia:
Unfortunately, recycling plastics has proven difficult. The biggest problem with plastics recycling is that it is difficult to automate the sorting of plastic waste, and so it is labor intensive. Typically, workers sort the plastic by looking at the resin identification code, though common containers like soda bottles can be sorted from memory. Other recyclable materials, such as metals, are easier to process mechanically.
While containers are usually made from a single type and color of plastic, making them relatively easy to sort out, a consumer product like a cellular phone may have many small parts consisting of over a dozen different types and colors of plastics. In a case like this, the resources it would take to separate the plastics far exceed their value, though complex items made of many types of plastics are not disposed of frequently. Developments are, however, taking place in the field of Active Disassembly, which may result in more consumer product components being re-used or recycled. Recycling certain types of plastics can be unprofitable, as well. For example, polystyrene is rarely recycled because it is usually not cost effective. These unrecyclable wastes can be disposed of in landfills, incinerated or used to produce electricity at waste-to-energy plants.
Currently, the percentage of plastics recycled in the U.S. is very small, somewhere around 5%...
Ludwig Wittgenstein
A great application of nanotechnology and robotics would be to create bots which would sift through the landfills and separate out all the different substances: 'chew' the stuff and spit out the various components. But I fear it's too late ... the world's economy is going to tank before we have time to develop such a thing.
Yes, but 1) you're using it already, so it can't be used for anything else, 2) hydropower is going to be an increasingly small percentage of the earth's energy supply due to it's own environmental problems, and 3) it takes a long time to ramp up new power capacity. On the order of 10 years per plant. Whatever replaces hydrocarbon fuels is definately going to take a longer timescale than the average slashdotter has left to become the majority energy source.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
So, a guy takes old bicycle tires and makes them into messenger bags, which he sells to upper-class fashionistas willing and able to shell out $148 for a book bag made of rubber (!). Another entrepreneur makes sidewalk pavers out of old auto tires, which last longer and are more bouncy than concrete.
Ooookay. That's nice. But...er...what happens when the bag wears out? Or the paver gets too many cuts and dings from inline skates and people falling off bikes? You've got your trash back again, that's what. There's no sign that these folks can use their own worn-out products to make new products. So all they seem to have done is take some small part of the rubber trash stream and make it go 'round just one more time.
This doesn't seem to me like what we normally think of as "recycling." When you recycle an aluminum can, it can go around and around practically forever -- buy it, use it, gather it back up, melt it, form a new can, re-fill it, and sell it again. Same with glass recycling -- sell the bottle, gather it up again, smash it, melt it, make a new bottle, sell it again. Rince, lather, repeat.
Something like those technologies is what I'd call true sustainable recycling practises. Something that takes a one-pass trip from virgin resource to trash dump and turns it into a nearly closed loop, with the resource making dozens of passes through consumer products. As far as I can see, this article just talks about taking a one-pass trip and making it into a two-pass trip. Big deal.
"And don't get me started on the fact that plastics only last 1000 years in a dump if you bury it like an idiot. Plastics are photosensitive and will decay rapidly if just left where they can get sunlight."
Sorry, but even in sunlight, they don't decay fast enough.
There is a giant ( twice the size of Texas ) pile of floating plastic in the north eastern Pacific know as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. An unfourtunate combination of wind and currents causes most anything dropped into the northern Pacific to get trapped there. There are millions of pounds of trash. And most of it is plastic, because everything else has been broken down.
Anybody recall the Bucky Fuller quote? Something to the effect that pollutants are resources that we are to ignorant to harvest...?
I suppose they could be lead crystal glass tubes ...
Bingo. It's heavily leaded glass to absorb X-rays generated by the electron beams smashing into the aperture grille etc.
This silly idea for recycled sidewalks is totally stupid, it completely ignores the basic facts: you're not taking garbage out of the environment, you're just distributing it in different spots, like EVERYWHERE. So instead of old rubber rotting away in a massive pile in a dump, it's rotting away in everyone's front yard. I think this is infinitely LESS preferable to concrete, at least you can rip up old concrete, break it down into gravel, and use it to make NEW concrete, and even in a dump, concrete is totally inert. But a recycled rubber sidewalk is just going to decompose and end up as hydrocarbon pollution that enters the ground and groundwater. If you dispose of tires in a dump, maybe you can put it in a clay-lined dig, where the decomposition products won't run into the ground water, but if it's in everyone's front yard, it won't take long before the pollution ends up in the land, water, and in our bodies.
The glass of a crt's monitor is filled with lead. Consider that a crt monitor is an electron gun, and the health implications of sitting for hours on end of one, were it not full of something to keep x-rays from irradiating the sitter.
8 .pdf
Some Reference:
http://www.svtc.org/hightech_prod/desktop.htm
http://www.qsrecycling.com/whatisacrt.html
http://www.epa.gov/dfe/pubs/comp-dic/lca-sum/ques
exegene refugee memories in hiding
Back in the '80s a business partner and I had a company that literally turned garbage into gold. We would deinstall old mini-computer installations. Minicomputers for those too young to remember were often larger than refrigerators and could have hundreds of circuit boards in them. We'd then pull the board from them and since the computers still had an installed base but few parts available sell the parts to 3rd party repair depots around the country. Whatever didn't sell got boxed up and sent by the ton to a smelter who would extract the gold, silver, copper, etc. Some circuit boards, NCR for instance, had every trace and ground plane gold plated many times thicker than the connectors on today's computers. The huge aluminum castings of disk drives (80 to 100 pounds each) were great scrap too.
Eventually the installed base of systems dried up. That's when my second career started...
Well, the CRT is crushed in compacting of the garbage, then water can enter and wash away lead which leaches into the soil. Leaded solder is still used too. However, the EU is apparently demanding their devices use lead-free solder very soon, so the rest of the world may benefit from their legislation when tech manufacturers switch over.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Believe it. Now you know why TVs and monitors are so heavy I guess. I don't want to imagine how much lead has made it back into our drinking water because of crushed TVs and rain runoff. I think legislators don't care to think about it as well. Maybe they should be though before we all have lead poisoning.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
You can read more here: a report from NH Dept of Environmental Services.
I have taken the liberty of copying a few salient points:
Not really related to what you said, but since I found it: here's something from Ohio State:
but what these people are doing is not recycling. What they are doing is delaying the inevitable. Removing old inner tubes and tires and ink cartridges from landfills and dumps reduces the volume of trash for now. When the tote bags and rubber sidewalks wear out and the ink cartridges can no longer be refilled, they will end up in a landfill or garbage dump. When that happens, we will have the same volume of trash as we started with.
Energy isn't the only cost driver. Employees and tipping fees are also big pieces of the pie. When they're high enough, recycling makes sense. Energy isn't everything.
Aperture grille? Shadow mask? WTF is that all about?
If everyone is not using LCD monitors by now they should be shunned and tsked at by the general population for being energy-wasters.
FYI this company has done it on the small scale with pilot plants, and is poised to be the first on the market with commercially based cellulose to ethnol plants. This literally takes peoples trash and converts it to usable fuel. Kind of like Rumpelstiltskin in the energy world. http://www.bluefireethanol.com/?sd I don't know about you guys, but I want to get a flex-fuel vehicle ASAP, gas is killing me! -=DG
Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
So, that's what Dell's been experimenting with!
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Someone ought to let AOL know, it'd save them some digging...
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
How's nuclear doing? From what I vaguely recall, it has a slow ramp-up time as well, but it's gaining a bit more traction with environmentally-minded folk (again, if I vaguely recall correctly).
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
And yet still they are able to sell them at a profit. Strange, eh? But not so strange when you consider that people willing pay $99 for a designer t-shirt when essentially the same thing being sold elsewhere for $5. If nothing else, the symbolism and novelty makes these things worth the extra cost, at least in the eyes of some.
The trick to recycling is to do so in an economic manner
Well, the trick to any business is to bring in more money than you send out. Looks like these people have figured out a way to do it, Walmart or no Walmart.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
They make mats cut to link together -> marcketed as shop mats, horse stall mats, etc. They also have Rolls of rubber spoolled for other manufacturers to process further. The junk they can't make in to anything is sold to run generators (converted to burn ground rubber instead of gasoline). It runs all the time, and smells a bit like rubber every once and a while. As for noise the train makes more noise than the rubber plant, as well as shaking the house. So good stuff, but I still like concrete better, you know they also can recycle asphalt?
From http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/recycle. htm
... 42 percent of paper, 40 percent of plastic drink bottles, 55 percent of aluminum cans, 57 percent of steel packaging, and 52 percent of appliances are now recycled."
t m
n dex.htm
"In 1999, recycling and composting kept ~64 million tons of material from landfills and incinerators. Today, this country recycles 28 percent of its waste...
It seems like the Baby Boom consumer generation has left us with a legacy of trash we are continuing to produce, and we should invest in the infrastructure to mine it. Sort of high-end dumpster diving. But there are problems:
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/paper.h
Paper - "challenges facing recovered paper processors and manufacturers are: 1) contamination, 2) sorting, and 3) fiber degradation... inks, adhesives, food, and broken glass affect the quality of recycled paper... Office paper cannot be recycled with newspaper and maintain its fiber integrity." And then the EPA website lists nice benefits of recycled paper as well.
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/tires/i
Tires: "There are at least 275 million scrap tires in stockpiles in the U.S. In addition, approximately 290 million scrap tires were generated in 2003. Markets now exist for about 80 percent of scrap tires--up from 17 percent in 1990."
Doing anything with tires other than puting them in a big pile is a good idea. Tire piles are a fire hazard and are a great place for culturing things like mosquitos, rats, and skunks. In addition, tires have a very poor packing efficiency and just take up a lot of space.
Got the $$ for it? A decent LCD screen to replace a living room TV is not the cheapest thing in the world, so there are going to be a lot of people who just can't afford to upgrade, especially if the Tube-TV works fine.
I know what you mean, and I was being facetious. But at least the cost of LCD and DLP sets are dropping quickly now. When my 19" Mitsubishi monitors (I do CAD work) died (strangely within 3 months of each other) there was nowhere else to go but LCD. So now I have LCD monitors that have failing pixels.
. That dot to the left is what my current monitor shows in places. Never had that problem with CRTs.
Currently all my city is doing with the methane that come from its garbage dumb is to burn it in order to reduce odors, but they are planning soon to add a generator, that will:
- get rid of a gaz that is 20 times worst than CO2 at creating the greenhouse effect
- generate electricity from a fuel that is free, and since the electricity is local, it reduces transmission line loses, and create local jobs.
- the heat generated will be used to heat a greenhouse during the winter, and so create jobs and reduce transportation fees and fuel.
- and create revenues for the city.
Not bad for something that was just a nuisance.
WTF are you talking about, "nobody counts that blah blah hippie shit"? Even the USDA is accounting for the environmental impact of production wastes. I'd recommend you read the 2003 report on sustainable forests.
So do people clear-cutting forests in Chile to make a buck, because they can, given current paper economics. And what's worse is that locals tend to be indiscretionate as the their "land management practices;" ie, they mostly clearcut old-growth forestation.
check out this site for an interesting overview of the current state and possible future of affairs on the pulp production
I wonder if you're one of those people also against the introduction of GM tree crops on managed lands, programs which aim to produce more pulp per acre (which, btw, is going to come from somewhere, old growth or new growth, South America, North America, wherever, like it or not) than current yield. The world's population is getting larger, and demand for wood-pulp isn't declining.
Oh, and BTW, American tree farms and land-re-use programs have actually allowed for the US to reclaim more natural forest cover than was present in the last 100 years.
I've had half-a-dozen client machines completely DOA until I install Linux onto them, over the top of "Doze (typically XP, but IRL all breeds).
I've also had two works-forever Linux bozes go DOA when 'Doze was installed on them.
No, I don't make this up. I don't need to. This is Real Life®.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"'The sustainability and restoring of our environment are providing opportunities in many fields of small business,'"
I'm going to do my part and recycle all YOUR comments from now on.
I wank in the shower.
I just cleaned out my old supply of work clothes, two large trashbag's worth of torn pants, paint-spattered t-shirts and decrepit cold-weather gear. This stuff was much too destroyed for Goodwill, but when I looked online for a local recycler, no-one was taking rags. I could get an industrial rag-recycling outfit to take it off my hands, but it would cost me around two hundred bucks. That's it.
Times are good for the shmatte man. Places like 1-800-Got-Junk charge people bundles to take away what we used to sell to them. Has junk gotten so pervasive that the labor costs for old-timey recycling exceed the value of the materials, or has the American public gotten so used to abundance that they can't percieve the value in old things?
The wierdest thing I've ever done to a computer to make it work, and I am ashamed to admit it, is to put the Windows Operating System on it. I still don't know why it works once it's up, albeit there seems to be some hit or miss...
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
Res publica non dominetur
It's going to take time in geological scale for any lead to get out of the glass it is part of. Considering vitrification is a way of getting radwaste out of the environment for an immensely long time, why are we worrying about leaded glass? The only worry is to keep it OUT of the recycling stream so you don't get it in glass intended for food, and, even then it is unlikely to go anywhere.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Of course then you'll have the landfill conservationists picketing you and chaining themselves to old sofas and refrigerators.
Most of the things people consider to be recycling are actually *NOT*. Making rubber sidewalks from old tires is *DOWNCYCLING*. The process of making the sidewalks contaminates the rubber material so it can't be used again. What do we do with the rubber sidewalks when they are no good anymore? True recycling would turn those old tires back into tires again. Making the tire companies responsible for deposit, return and recycling services for thier product (back into tires again) would be more to the point. Perhaps we would then see tire technology change so that the product could be remanufactured easily. The same goes for fabrics made from old plastic milk bottles. What do you do with the rags when they are not of use again? Sooner or later downcycled stuff ends up in the landfill. It's better to make materials from renewable sources that break down without landfilling. ie: instead of styrene foams use silica ceramic foams. The problem is energy and the cost of production for these newer materials. You may save landfill space but you burn huge amounts of energy to produce them.
In addition to recycling garbage directly into other products such as sidewalks, we also have the high temperature plants that convert it into diesel. And then there's the reuse movement - a shopping bag becomes a garbage can liner, etc. You have to look at this as an evolution of the human economy in a positive direction.
As an added note a company called Itronics (ITRO) takes photochemical waste and turns it into silver bars and fertilizer for farms. Pretty interesting company. http://www.itronics.com/
My well being does not depend on my slashdot score.
One of the problems is how you account for the energy costs. You have to look at the total product lifecycle, which includes the energy required to obtain the raw materials for a new product, process it, process it into the good, transport it to the market, the amount it uses during use, the length of its lifetime in service, and the energy cost to dispose of it. The question is which of the total lifecycle energy costs did Penn and Teller take into account?
Also perhaps the challenge in future is to design products that make recovery of the raw materials easier to make recycling cheaper. An example is a German company. It originally produced solder in plastic containers. A German government requirement meant that it was required to recover solder in partially used containers, sent back by consumers. This was difficult and expensive due to the mix of plastic and metal and the requirement to separate these before remelting the solder. The solution was to move to metal containers, and simply melt the whole assembly.
Plastics can last many decades. I have seen 40 year old plastics in early transistor radios, exposed to light for all that time, which are still durable. To make them degrade you have to assess the requirement for how quickly they should degrade, given their expected lifecycle, and then use an appropriate plastic for the job.
Ultimately, though, reuse is better than recycling. If a product can be refurbished and reused without an unreasonable level of energy expenditure during the refurbishing or in future use (e.g. 20 year old fridges are probably not worth refurbishing as new ones are so much more efficient) then it should be. Sometimes to make reuse easier there needs to be more energy investment originally. For example well built furniture can be reused by families just starting out that don't have the money to buy new. Flat pack furniture probably won't last. Again you need to weigh up the pros and cons.
There is no reason to ever make thin copper wire out of lead. br? Yes there is, thats a Brilliant idea!
Perhaps the government can meet more needs per dollar because it has more money to spread around (so much that economies of scale start to kick in)?
Why should I do forced to buy something I don't want? That's what government does. I don't mind groups getting together to buy in bulk, I buy in bulk when I can and I'm a member of two coops. But that is voluntary not by force of arms.
FalconShould there be a Law?
A large company has one and only one motivation. Profit. (In fact, if they're a publically traded corporation, they have a LEGAL responsibility to maximize profit.)
Wrong! It's hardly ever since now but originally corporate charters were established to further the public good. As for maximizing profits, I guess you've never heard of Whole Foods. It is one of the fastest growing grocery chains in the US and part of it's charter or bylaws is to help the local communities it operates in and stockholders should know this when they buy shares. Now it could be said they have grown fast because of this but it was started with returning value back to the communities as one of it's values.
Do you really and honestly believe that you'll get the best possible deal from a large company?
And how do they get that way? Big companies get big because of big government and the government giving out natural monopolies. Big businesses only get their power from big government.
FalconShould there be a Law?
People don't get breaks from radon, which can cause lung cancer, in concrete either. So what's left to make sidewalks with? Bricks are used but they have the problem of breaking up just as concrete does and can cause falls and such. How about dirt? There was dirty there to begin with but people demanded they be paved. As far as the health problems with breathing are concerned that you list desiel exhaust causes the same problems.
FalconShould there be a Law?
And don't get me started on the fact that plastics only last 1000 years in a dump if you bury it like an idiot. Plastics are photosensitive and will decay rapidly if just left where they can get sunlight.
Yes some plastics are sun, light, degradable. But this requires sunlight, and where does the vast majority of used plastic go? It gets buried in landfills. I doubt many people would like it if plastics were just laying around anywhere waiting to degrade. Also plastic can be deadly. Have you ever seen what one of those plastic rings that are used to hold sixpacks together can do? I've seen a number of birds killed because of them. They've also killed turtles, fish, and other wildlife as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
a cellular phone may have many small parts consisting of over a dozen different types and colors of plastics. In a case like this, the resources it would take to separate the plastics far exceed their value
Ah but there's another reason to recycle cellphones, for the coltan in them. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a major source of coltan and the profits of mining it pay for the deaths of thousands. Much of the conflict in the Congo is a resource conflict.
Since the outbreak of fighting in August 1998
- * At least 3.3 million people, mostly women, children and the elderly, are estimated to have died because of the conflict, most from disease and starvation
- * More than 2.25 million people have been driven from their homes, many of them beyond the reach of humanitarian agencies.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It's going to take time in geological scale for any lead to get out of the glass it is part of.
That's a very reasonable thought, with which I'd have instinctively agreed, but unfortunately it turns out not to be true. Apparently it takes mere hours to days if the glass is crushed. Here is a surprising brief report from Science News, which, since it's in a God-damned PDF, I will quote:
Though anecdotal reports have hinted that picture tubes' glass might leach [lead], no one knew how much, notes Timothy G. Townsend of the University of Florida in Gainesville. To fill that data gap, his team tested 36 picture tubes.... The researchers...took samples from different portions of the tubes' glass. Then, they crushed the glass into fine and coarse particles, shook 100 grams of each sample in a beaker of acidic water for several hours, and measured how much lead had leached into the water....lead from all 30 color [picture tubes] exceeded [the Federal safety standard for lead in water of 5 mg/L]....Some glass tainted water with more than 200 mg/l of lead [40 times the Federal safety limit]. When that glass was crushed to pieces less than 5 millimeters in diameter, it had the largest surface area and leached the most--often tainting water with 400 mg/L of lead [80 times the Federal safety limit]. The researchers also discovered why color units leach so much lead: It's their frit, which 70 percent lead by weight. From now on, the researchers conclude, color picture tubes should be considered hazardous waste and kept out of landfills and municipal-waste incinerators.
Strange and unsettling. The article is from 2000, we can hope things have improved since then.
One historical example, relevant here, is that our entire modern plastics industry is based around the fact that when oil started to be refined into gasoline and kerosene for smaller and more delicate engines around the turn of the 20th century, the process left behind sludgy heavy "garbage" residue, which was a mere nuisance until some chemists in the 20s and 30s figured out you could polymerize the "garbage" and turn it into strong, lightweight plastics. Poof, straw into gold. Hardly an uncommon event, historically speaking.
"Modern history" yes, but the original plastics were made from plants. Cellophane or plastic wraps are a perfect example. Cellophane was made from plant cellulose. In the 1930's Du Pont came out with patent for a method of converting petroleum into plastic. For this reason along with others hemp was made illegal. Hemp, one of the most industrially useful plants there is, was a good source of stock to make plastic. Henry Ford built a car on his Iron Mountain Estate that was partially built with hemp he grew on the estate. He also used fuel made from hemp to power the car. But because some saw hemp as a threat it was made illegal via the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I find that very difficult do believe. I mean that's 5-25 POUNDS of solder. What the hell are they doing in there?
Lead isn't in just the solder, there's also lead in the glass.
FalconShould there be a Law?
>a href="http://www.netfeed.com/~jhill/westley.htm"> TIRE FIRE NEAR WESTLEY,CA 09-22-1999 9:36AM
FalconShould there be a Law?
Tire fire near Westley, CA 09-22-1999 9:36AM
FalconShould there be a Law?
The name of the show is "Bullshit!". I thought that was clear from the GP's post.
You can often fix stuck on pixels by pressing your finger firmly against that point on the screen.
If you have trouble hitting it move your line of sight to the pixel in question (to eliminate parallax) and try rolling your finger around a bit.
I don't think it works at all for stuck off pixels.
-Peter
My brother used to work for a company that would:
- check out the waste-chemicals of a plant.
- evaluate what might be of use.
- offer to dispose of the interesting chemicals, cheaper than the normal waste-processing of those chemicals would cost.
- Sell the chemicals where someone else needs them!
They would get money on both ends: both getting the goods, as well as getting rid of them. There might be a refining step in the middle, usually cheap enough not to spoil the fun....