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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.'"
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.
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.
I posted about rubber sidewalks in another forum... here's better links:
Christian Science Monitor story
Rubber Sidewalk company page
Economical? Not yet, and not far away from California. Maybe if you're a streets & sanitation manager for a rich town and have money to blow in exchange for lower maintenance cost down the road. But that's why I appreciate small businesses in America and worldwide; they can be effective in their own niche and take risks that bigger companies wouldn't make.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
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
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.
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.
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...
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?