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Giant Microwave Turns Plastic Back to Oil
An anonymous reader writes "From the newscientist article: "Key to GRC's process is a machine that uses 1200 different frequencies within the microwave range, which act on specific hydrocarbon materials. As the material is zapped at the appropriate wavelength, part of the hydrocarbons that make up the plastic and rubber in the material are broken down into diesel oil and combustible gas.""
That the mines of the next century will be our garbage mountains. It will be the place with the highest density of easily obtainable materials.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
no mention on how much energy it takes to run the thing, or how much energy it puts out. it's not of much use if it costs a fraction to just bury the old plastic and make new stuff from scratch.
FTA: "GRC says its Hawk-10 can extract enough oil and gas from the left-over fluff to run the Hawk-10 itself and a number of other machines used by Gershow." So, yeah, you get energy out of this, I guess. You do add a bunch of CO2 to the atmosphere, though...
The short of it is that you need to do is put a lot of electrical energy into water and you get hydrogen. Electricity can't run a car because you can't just have an extension cord dragging out the back. Hydrogen is a portable form of energy that a car can run on. The fact that it takes more energy to produce than gasoline is irrelevant.
God spoke to me.
hell yellow cake is found 180m at times
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Giant Microwave ?? What a oxymoron !!
Great.. and just when we were starting to look at alternative fuel
Just need to have non-stupid options. Every four or five months, I check with my state's waste management website for how to handle the tricky stuff (like fluorescent tubes and button batteries), mostly because that's about how often I lose a CFL. Their answer is that I must drive halfway across the state (it's a small state, but the way the roads are, half-way across might as well be all the way across). Also, I have to make a special appointment for the privilege.
I might consider doing this when my CRT monitor finally fails, but somehow I doubt that burning 12 gallons of gasoline for a single compact bulb is less harmful to the environment than tossing it in with the regular trash. And if it's not, then there's no point in my continuing to use them, as the 12 gallons of gasoline puts the lifetime cost well over that which regular light bulbs would've been over the same time period. They fail to break often enough that just accumulating a bunch of spent CFLs is really an option. It'd take me ten years to fill a small box with 'em, and frankly, I don't want to store hazardous waste for that long.
The items aren't exactly very large or numerous. I fail to see why they can't just put one or more small bins at the transfer station for them. How much space would a whole town's worth of expired button batteries need to take, anyway?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
What's different about people in the Netherlands? We too are lazy by nature. That's why the chemical recycling center sends a truck (called the chemocar) round the neighborhoods every now and then. When it's near, you just take your chemobox with your batteries and whatnot and bring it to the truck outside. They sort its contents while you wait and you get your box back. It takes 3 minutes, flat.
If you miss a round, no big deal. You won't fill up your box that fast anyway.
Sorting your trash at home takes no time at all. For most trash you just need to remember this: If it rots, it goes into the green container, if it doesn't, put it in the grey container. Paper and chemicals have their own box.
Really, it doesn't take time, and AFAIK, the only thing the government had to do to enforce it was have a public awareness campaign...
No it wouldn't.
The US used-to produce the vast majority of the world's oil. It was the largest exporting nation by far, but production has slowed and many of the oil deposits have been exhausted. The US has always been, and still is, one of the top 3 oil producing nations.
The reason the US isn't the old and "new Saudi Arabia for oil" isn't because of lack of oil, but because the US uses so much that despite the huge production, we still have to import more.
You can bet, if liquid fuel from coal gets cheap, our energy usage will go through the roof, and we'll use every last bit of it in record time, and quickly start importing it from other countries.
Saudi Arabia is what it is not because it has oil, but because it's oil is combined with a tiny, tiny population, who couldn't use a tiny fraction of it all if they tried. We don't have that "problem" in the US.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well I was going to mention that this was an upper middle class town, so that isn't much of a problem.
But in the city right next door they started charging $4 for stickers you put on large items to have them picked up. Naturally, some streets are littered with old couches and mattresses without trash stickers. $4 dollars while reasonable, is still more than some people are willing to pay.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
That had to be the worst anti-recycling link I've ever read. Heck, Penn and Teller even did a better job. Many Items are profitable to recycle, hence the existence of private scrap yards. Some consumer waste 'is' profitable, but since the US local governments decide to do curbside pickup, it no longer saves energy. They solved this problem in Vienna by having neighborhood bins. The trucks only come when the bin is full. A simple idea like that turned glass and metal (including aluminum) profitable. Granted, the profit goes to subsidize the plastic recycling, which needs local compactors to break even.
Corporate recycling (bottles from bars that go back to the bottler, unsold newspaper pickup, etc, are all private and profitable.
In conclusion, recycling consumer waste 'can' be profitable, and the low hanging fruit already is profitable. It's just that our governing bodys (that control recycling) are too dumb and wasteful to figure it out.
BBH
The problem with these sorts of things is that the people who really contribute to the problem will just look at the fee as a way of alleviating their guilt.
True story:
A day-care center was having a real problem with parents arriving late (2-3 hours after they were supposed to) to pick up their kids. So someone at the day-care center had the bright idea of charging $10 per incident if a parent was more than 30 minutes late. Guess what happened? MORE parents showed up late and paid the $10! They felt like the $10 fine made it OK and they stopped trying as hard to avoid being late.
Eventually the problem got solved by making it a 3-strike policy: if you're more than 30 minutes late 3 times you have to find another place to send your kids. They really worked up the guilt angle on this, too - "You know, moving your child to another day-care provider is going to be incredibly disruptive for them" and the inconvenience angle - "You're already struggling to meet your schedule, do you really want to have to take the time to find another place for your child?" Once they instituted that policy, lateness dropped dramatically.
So, I would say that the way to handle people who overproduce trash or don't sort it isn't to just charge them some minimal fine (sorry, but $1.50 so I don't have to fuck around with sorting my garbage? I'm lazy enough to think that's a deal, and I'm sure I'm not the only one). The way to handle it is to make it less convenient or attractive to just make extra trash/not sort it than the other option. I don't have anything specific in mind, but maybe something along the lines of an individual trash allotment, which, if you exceed it, requires that you document the contents of the trash that's exceeding it and pay a moderate fine. If you don't document it you pay a not-so-moderate fine. Make it a bigger pain in the ass to not sort/reduce waste and people will take the easier way. Make it just a matter of throwing a fairly trivial amount of money at a problem, and the biggest problem people will keep their old habits.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
No, the reason why plastics are not very recyclable is that you cannot substitute one plastic for another. The previous method recycles polycarbonate from CDs only into polycarbonate. Polycarbonate cannot be used instead of polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, etc. These other plastics have far more uses. So turning into fuel is a more general use to me.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What's neat about this is that it takes waste products that would end up in a land fill and converts them to a usable form again... with a surplus over the amount of energy needed to do so. Not much, certainly not enough to supplant alternative fuel sources... but enough to drive the conversion process and power a few other machines nearby.
This will be great for factories all around and farms and other types of businesses that end up with a lot of waste material. Maybe we can make those 75% self-sustaining... which means they won't be depleting more raw materials as quickly. This is a good thing.
Even if the only use is for our Municipal trash companies to run their fleet of vehicles off of the trash they collect... we've won a huge gain. Maybe trucking companies could do the same... converting their used tires to fuel every month (they go through a lot of tires).
This is equivalent to farms using their biomass to convert to biodiesel or ethanol for use in their farm equipment. It's not a commercial enterprise but it reduces waste and improves their efficiency which means they can pass the savings on to the rest of us (or stop needing subsidies from tax dollars).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Not ideal, to be sure. And it IS what their first customer appears to be doing. Still, this is better than burying the plastic in a landfill and pumping more oil out of the ground to be burned. I guess baby steps are better than no steps at all.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.