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Recycled Tires Could Filter Water
MattSparkes writes "According to New Scientist, water could be cleansed and filtered more easily and cheaply by using old tires. From the article: 'Rubber tires, the kind that lie at the bottom of rivers and at the back of junkyards the world over, could be ideal water filters says an environmental engineer at Penn State University in the US.'"
Here's a picture of the process that Yuefeng Xie set up at PSU.
Note that on his homepage under news he has "A patent "Method of Using Waste Tires As A Filter Media" was issued to me on November 29, 2005. With 40% of royalties to the inventor (other 60% goes to Penn State), I am going to be a rich professor very soon."
Which reveals he applied for this patent on Aug. 26, 1999.
A lot of the material I can find online makes it look as though he's been working on this for six years, he was just waiting for the patent to to be granted. It seems now they just have to verify tha the water that is processed doesn't leach out any harmful toxins or heavy metals (as the article states). A side note is that he only has one other patent aside from this one.
Despite his plans to become rich over this, I hope he is very successful as a lot of countries (both 3rd and 1st world) could stand to benefit from this greatly.
My work here is dung.
do you really want to drink water that tastes like old tire?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
http://www.nova.edu/ocean/tire_reef_washpost.html
I was under the impression that for the last 10-15 years at least they stopped making tires out of rubber. A 10 year old tire is pretty old for a tire.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Forget about Zagat's Michelin food guide, this time Zagat, Chairman Kaga, and Iron Chefs will taste test water filtered by Bridgestone/Firestone, BFGoodrich, Goodyear, generic retreads, and of course, Michelins.
There was a case where someone had the bright idea of dumping tires over a huge area of open sea, to offer marine habitat. Years and years later, the barnacles and coral organisms haven't adopted this habitat, because the tide keeps pushing the tires around, unlike heavier debris. It's an eco-disaster, worse than nothing, essentially.
They're finally getting around to hauling them up, but volunteer effort can only go after a few tires at a time, with tens of thousands or millions of tires to go. Maybe if there was a clear use for all the tires, they could get some funds to lift the old "reef" up and use it for a different, and this time beneficial, marine-related purpose.
[
From a billboard in Fight Club(movie):
"You can use recycled motor oil to fertilize your lawn!"
Firestone tires may have a functional use after all!
My first concern is that I am quite allergic to cyclohexylthiophthalimide (CTP) a chemical used in vulcanizing rubber. Yes, I am allergic to car tires. Makes me very, very ill. While I don't get sick in normal traffic I get sick at the drag races from the burnouts and I can't spend more than 30 minutes in a tire shop.
Whether water filtered through tires would bother me or not I don't know but it should be checked into first.
pay tire disposal fee to costco!
--Ram
Kill me now with bacteria and other problems or later via the leeching of heavy metals (mentioned in article). I think I would choose the heavy metals if I was in a third world country.
Crumb rubber has found uses in sewage plants as a filler material to bulk up the sewage, replacing the tons of wood chips that would normally have to be discarded. In places with erosion problems burying tires make excellent barriers combined with terracing techniques. There have also been programs to make artificial reefs with tires, making great fish habitats (if done properly that is). I read an article on using the 2" chips as mulch for blueberry plants. Some companies are playing with pyrolysis as well - getting a good deal of oil from the tires by heating them under an oxygen free and high pressure environment.
There's really no limit to what you can do with waste tires. If this method works well I'm sure some countries could benefit, though I don't know how well the filters work. I can't imagine them removing arsenic or bacteria, but possibly they could condition the water so that a better filter could last longer? The article was a little vague on details - anyone provide some insight to this end?
Scientist comes up with potentially dangerous solution to problem that already has a safe solution.
That's *why* we chuck them in the river....
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Achille Talon
Hop!
Soon our oceans will be much cleaner thanks to extra tires!
I didn't know Michael Richards visited Slashdot...
"But this one goes to 11!"
Cant trust an article that has the words "backwash" and "rubber" in it..
Strongbadia (population: tire) will be prosperous! And have tasty water!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
From the last part of the article (for those who don't RTFA):
I, for one, do not welcome our contaminant-leaching, sewage adsorbing overlords.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Lets just leave all those old tires on the bottom of the river and let them clean the river instead.
Scientist comes up with potentially safe and economical solution to a problem that already has a safe and expensive solution.
That just totally explains the taste of tap water in Adelaide.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The people of Springfield could make a killing.
If they'd put out the fire first.
Stachel
It seems that the technology is just a bigass filter. The smallest particles in the filter, crumb rubber, are 1 mm or so across. So what? That may give you clear water, but it won't filter out the bacteria, viruses, dissolved organic contaminants, etc.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
We use it in Arizona, though not at much as we should, and it's awesome. Even if there weren't the benefits of getting rid of old tires it's still great stuff. It offers a much quieter ride but the real winner is that it deals with thermal expansion real well. The desert has massive temperature deltas, it can be 70 degrees in a day or more, every day. Because of that and the extreme heat, roads wear out fast. However the rubberized asphalt stands up to it quite well.
This is probably not a problem. Water is filtered to different standards, depending on what is going to happen to it. There is a much more rigorous filtering of water that will be reintroduced to the drinking water supply than water used for irrigation only (which is expressly marked as non-potable) or water that is just going to be flushed out to sea as waste.
Allergens are one of many things they worry about in water for drinking.
It's a great way to get rid of all that pesky dioxin in the rubber. Just add a little lemon juice to cover the taste.
A group of us moderators got together after reading your post. We thought, "What the hell. This is obviously a pathetic plea for attention and the unnecessary use of ALL CAPS can be forgiven amongst friends."
At one point it was suggested to moderate your post, "Illegal use of bandwidth - five yards and loss of down." The European contingent suggested "Illegal use of hands" (keyboard usage) which had a broader appeal.
In the end we decided to ignore your post and proceed to the nearest bar for further consultation.
We weren't drunk when we posted this response but we wish we were.
There have also been programs to make artificial reefs with tires, making great fish habitats (if done properly that is).
Yes, indeed. Tire reefs do have to be done properly. I heard an interesting story about a month ago on National Public Radio about an artificial reef off the coast of Florida. Apparently the thing consists of over a million old tires and the geniuses who constructed it back in the 1960s used steel chains to tie bunches of them together. Over the years, the chains corroded and broke, and currents and storm surges caused the loose tires to roll all over the seafloor and wash up on Florida beaches.
Almost no coral has grown on these tires because they are moving around so much, and now there is now an expensive cleanup effort underway to clean up over a million tires scattered all over the sea floor. It was a good idea, but a very poor implementation. Steel chains don't exactly last forever under the ocean.
There was a lot of talk a few months ago about how Florida is now trying to clean up millions of tires that were dumped off the coast in 1972 in order to create reefs. Perhaps there is some way to use tires to make good reefs, but this certainly is not. Stuff like this shows that what might seems like a good use for trash may come back as an ever bigger problem years latter.
Mmmmm. Benzene.
Yet another slashvertisement for New Scientist claptrap. Will the pseudo science crap ever stop? If I wanted to read that shit I'd go there, PLEASE stop posting it here.
"New" Scientist? If this is the new science I don't want anything to do with it.
At least they do not claim to be scientists, just "New Scientists". New Scientist = euphemism for Pseudo Scientist.
Give us some real science please. You won't find it at New Scientist, nor will you find it in Nature.
You can find real science in publications like those overseen by the following organisations: ACS, RSC, AIP, IOP, AMS, Elsevier, etc., etc...
See the difference? Probably not...
If they're lying at the bottom the river, aren't they already filtering our water?
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Now, maybe this is just a gross oversimplification of the problem... but I came up with two solutions to this "problem" a second after I read it...
1) Multiple seperate filters, each only containing a single size of sand particle.
2) Use the natural process (gravity and water) to your advantage... If backflushing perfectly inverts the particles, turn the whole filter over...
Of course, this is the first time I've heard anything negative about sand filtration systems, so I suspect this problem is largely invented for marketing purposes...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Saw this on 'The New Inventors' program here in Oz where it won last year's prize for best invention. I was amazed at the amount of oil that can come out of a tire, as well as the steel, fibre and rubber: http://www.molectra.com.au/technology.aspx
Water filtering does not have to be just for drinking. For instance, all sort of chemicals make their way onto road surfaces. Then rain water carries those chemicals into local watersheds.
I think I read once that the Autobahn had a special semi-porous drainage layer made of some compound material.
I have no expertise, but maybe new roads -instead of just having standard runoffs- could be slanted to lead to passive filtration surfaces that would partially clean the water. And maybe ground-up old tires could be used?
There are impermeable asphalt roads all over the world, of course. Think of all the drainage pipes in Manhattan that just empty into its rivers. Maybe there is some clever way with old tires filter that water passively.Plastic bottles already leach chemicals into bottled water ... I can't wait to see what comes out of the tires!
Why not recycle old tires to make new tires? Its such a crazy idea, it just might work.
If you have tires in your backyard with standing water in them, pour a few drops of bleach in the water to stop mosquito eggs from growing in them.
I only hope someone doesn't find some environmental use for used rubbers.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Use junk cars.. if they all had their windows open just a crack water could filter through...
Use human waste to filter water ! It is safer than tires, what this China man is proposing. Really it is chicken poop but it tastes just like water. Yum yum. Rat poop worked even better and eat rat, yum yum.
Unless, of course, you're Rodney McKay.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The problem, says Xie, is that these systems clog up very quickly - every couple days on average. Water is pushed through them backwards to clean them out, but this ruins the column's careful stacking as the large particles naturally settle to the bottom. Every subsequent filtration only uses the top of the column which therefore clogs up even faster. "The filters are designed to last 20 years but after one backwash you get a filter you don't want," says Xie.
Maybe a dumb question, but: why doesn't he just leave the larger particles on the bottom and introduce water into the filter from the bottom instead of the top?
Poor Rodney, I bet he'd be allergic to the rubber in the tires as well :))
(Also, YAY! for your mentioning of SGA)
SIG SEGV
I thought that dioxins were only created during the incineration of rubber and plastic products?
blah blah
Actually, I don't think Rodney has ever mentioned any allergies other than his citrus allergy.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
No, he hasn't! They could use dismantled replicators to purify water on Atlantis, though :))
But I see there was someone down the thread who actually said they were allergic to a component of the rubber.
SIG SEGV
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
It's ok, you don't need to feel left out, men get breast cancer too (about 250 a year in the UK). So keep on worrying.