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A Paper Alloy To Replace Plastic Cases
xwwt writes "In response to a paper by Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics, PEGA Design & Engineering has developed a new product that is intended to replace plastic shell material in computer equipment and electronics. The product contains a combination of paper and polypropylene (PP) which aids in recycling efforts and is intended to keep non-recyclable materials out of landfills. The PP should break down in sunlight and can be reclaimed. There is concern that polypropylene cannot be separated from the paper fiber and brings into question how the material will be recycled. As poster Paul Davis points out, it might have been better to use polylactic acid. Ultimately, it raises the question: is this truly a recyclable material?"
What does that even mean?
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
It's a step in the right direction. Maybe it's not completely recyclable. At least it's made from partially renewable materials.
The PP should break down in sunlight and can be reclaimed.
Well, it did for a while.
Have gnu, will travel.
...be cyber-punk
(disclaimer: not affiliated in any way with datamancer, just love the designs)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Keep out of direct sunlight, product may disintegrate
Glass
They will just protest even more claiming that those electronics are "made of dead trees".
Doesn't greenpeace like whine and cry over the amount of paper products we use? And let's not forget we have more forest here in north america, and we grow trees for pulping and lumbering just for that purpose anyway. But, considering the amount of anti-industrial, anti-progress, lets move society back in time crap that comes out of them anymore. People should just ignore them as the special interest group that they are.
Besides, the only real reason why we use plastic is because it's durable, lightweight and cheap. If we had a metal that was durable and light and cheap we'd use that too.
Om, nomnomnom...
Apparently that breaks down in the presense of oxygen. You know, like anywhere in earths oceans and atmosphere...
Made from 100% post-consumer waste, of course.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm not a chemist, but this sounds like one of those substances that'll degrade before it should, causing premature failure. plastic has gotten cheap and unreliable enough these days that I wonder if any increased recyclability is being offset by more products being thrown away due to premature breakage. perhaps it's anecdotal, but around the early 1990s, I noticed plastics getting lighter and more brittle, and larger products made with them had structural problems compared with their predecessors. examples coming to mind include kids toys, household appliances, automotive components, and personal electronics.
Even if it is a good idea as a case material(which isn't entirely clear, that plastic isn't going to be any more fun to recycle because of the tree guts mixed in, and the tree guts aren't going to be any more biodegradeable for the plastic encasing them, and any pigments, release agents, flame retardants, and other miscellanious additives aren't going to be any friendlier than they were in the usual ABS or polycarbonate...), the billing on the website as "the solution to e-waste" seems deeply overblown.
Case plastics aren't made of bunnies and happy thoughts, true, and mixed plastics are often not recycled(and if they are, issues like the difficulty of getting the color of the recycled material right out of an already-pigmented feedstock often consign the recycled material to low-value applications); but much of the really nasty stuff is happening on the circuit boards, and in their manufacture, not in the case. Particularly for a portable, where the case is vital to protecting the guts, and keeping the machine from creaking and generally falling to bits, the durability of the case is a major factor in how many years of use you get from the device. It seems like compromising on the case, to make it incrementally less unpleasant, is a bit of a false economy if it decreases the service life of the nastier(and more expensive) components inside.
So products are going to get even cheaper and less reliable than they already are. Why the hell would anyone buy a computer case that is designed to fail?
Liberty in your lifetime
A long time ago, during a more optimistic time when we dreamt of jet packs and lunar colonies (no,not by sacrifing the rest of the economy Newt Gingrich style) recycling wasn't going to be a problem.
Just drop waste into a plasma torch; everything would be reduced to "indivisible" atoms (yes I know that's what the word atom means).
I guess that particular dream vanished with the electric power from nuclear reactors that would be "too cheap to meter".
Anyway, not complaining too much. The past didn't see our future filled with fun handheld gadgets and the Internet. And who knows, maybe Siri will have a baby with Watson. (We should name him HAL). We also don't have nukes in low earth orbit ready to finish off the human race in a few minutes. Still, even though renewables will probably keep us warm in the winter and cool in the hotter summers, it's not clear that we'll have really high intensity power sources to squander, I mean use, anytime soon. I mean nuclear fusion is 20 years away and power from satellites even further.
Let's just hope it doesn't get as bad as in "The Windup Girl".
Will this laptop have a sunlight readable screen?
The PP should break down in sunlight and can be reclaimed.
Well, it did for a while.
And it won't have any sunlight in the landfill so it won't degrade very well? I thought one problem with landfills is that things that should degrade do not due to a lack of sunlight, oxygen, etc. IIRC some researchers have dug around in landfills from the 40s and 50s and found well preserved newspapers and other theoretical degradables. On the other hand some landfills are producing enough methane to make capture economical. Is it a soil thing? Breathable/permeable vs something more impenetrable?
Sometimes, computers can get pretty warm.... and paper doesn't exactly have a very high point of combustion. How flammable is this stuff?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You plastic is almost 100% recyclable. You simply melt it and re-form it. Of course dyes, paint, and other coatings, dirt, and impurities mean that you usually have to add some new stock if you want a high quality product - but still, it recycles very well - at least better than paper does. The problem isn't that plastic doesn't recycle, the problem is that people throw it in the trash because they are too lazy to recycle, or the local governments don't actually do recycling.
Paper and some materials aren't as recyclable as most metal or plastic (f.e. paper fibers get shorter each time they are recycled, resulting in a weaker product), but they are more bio-degradable. I think 100% recyclable, but not biodegradable is the best option if you can actually recycle it. (If your stuff is bio-degradable, then .. it will degrade).
Now look at this material, it is part paper and part plastic. I suspect it's not easily 100% recyclable nor 100% biodegradable.
make it out of chocolate and everyone will want it and have to buy new ones regularly.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
The number of trees and the amount of forest has increased.
The suburbs has been fairly effective in turning farmland into urban forests.
Mind you, it does not answer the question about old growth forests, etc. but still....
The green movement is so full of cow dung.
A minuscule percentage of the "break down in sunlight" bags actually do as they mostly get buried. In fact once buried deep enough nothing breaks down as no bacteria survive. They dug up a chicken bone meat and all after 50 years from a landfill.
This goes right next to these heavy green bags that replace the cheap disposable bags. The reality is that disposable bags get used again at least to hold rubbish. The reusable often do not and even they are 28 bags worth of plastic/energy most commonly used only a couple of times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_shopping_bag#Research
Only if people stop burying it in landfills.
OTOH Most of what we know about ancient people is by digging through their trash.
Any guesses how well this does in a standard UL fire resistance test? My guess is it's not going to be the kind of case you want when your Li-ion cells do the Sony thing.
Does it turn mushy when you pour water on it?
It'll probably do fine if it's only a low percentage of paper (IE, it's just greenwashing), but if it's actually a substantial amount I would expect it to light off like a fire log.
I am sorry, but polypropylene isn't something that is bio-degradable !!
Wikipedia's page on polypropylene ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polypropylene ) has this to say ---
" ... it is rugged and unusually resistant to many chemical solvents, bases and acids"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The details on this product are thin, but calling it an alloy sounds like a marketers idea to associate it with the properties of metals.
I think most people would call this a composite material.
Seems all sorts of recyclable, and won't require lots of nasty chemicals or more energy than starting from scratch to do it. Jobs solved this, why are they still trying, and failing, to figure it out?
It may not degrade or recycle easily, but polyethylene burns with a very clean flame. Chemically, PE is very similar to gasoline. So what, the material is not recycleable? No big deal.. it will probably work well in a fossil fuel power station where their energy can be cannibalized by newer PCs. Kind of like a Soylent Green for PCs. :D
I don't think alloy is the appropriate term for this material.
So, if the people who presented global warming were using falsified data, that necessarily proves that global climate change does not exist? I'm here to tell you that this warm winter I've had here in Michigan and that frigid snowy Winter in Italy.. not to mention the melting ice in Antarctica... are telling a story that is very much in line with the "false prophets" of global warming. The only difference between AGW nuts and us that live in reality is... us realists realize that the world will warm and cool and kill us all without noticing or caring that we were ever here. It wasn't cars, or nuclear energy, or the higgs boson, or coal power plants that will doom the Earth. The Earth is doomed no matter what we do. We only hurt ourselves by hurting our environment. We realists know that while our time on Earth is spectacularly short, that the actual lifespan of a habitable planet is relatively short when you take a few steps back and see the real history of the universe. To quote my favorite comedian George Carlin: "The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas."
So when I was repairing my surf ski with rolled up newspaper and polyester resin some years ago I was really making a "paper alloy"?
Deliberate fracture of language to make something sound like something else is to sign of a scam artist (or the marketing people for the composite in the article).
What about things we actually intend to NOT throw away or get rid of as soon as the next fad hits? It's already hard to enough to combat plastic yellowing due from UV exposure because of the bromine flame retardants.... now we have to keep it from disintegrating too? DO NOT WANT. At least with the yellowing issue, you can use 40vol cream peroxide gel and UV to reverse the process.
Why does everyone insist "green" means disposable? That mentality creates more waste as truly "green" electronics are a pipe dream....recycling electronics creates hazardous byproducts too BTW and not everybody is real clean about it.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't ABS plastic ALREADY recyclable as well as steel and aluminum used in current PC chassis?
Is more crap ultimately being thrown away worth the switch in terms of costs to the environment? Why should I have to buy twice as much just to make a few hippies feel better? We can already recycle plastic. Plus.... I already recycle PC cases all the time as I'm sure most folks here do. Usually every few processor generations I slap some new guts in. Voila.....recycling at work.
How about instead of making stuff out of crap, flimsy materials, use aluminum or alloys that by nature are easily reusable and recyclable. I have no desire to buy a computer made out of plastic, nor paper that looks like plastic.
Metal has been recycled for hundreds of years, and is a fine material for PC and laptop cases. Cast alloy Toughbooks and other rugged machines are some examples.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
It's a step in the right direction.
Or not.
If it is like these "biodegradable" plastic bags, than it isn't. I put "biodegradeable" in quotation marks because it should be called "out-of-sight-out-of-mind plastic". They add metals into the plastic, so it brakes down quicker. But while it looks like it's rotting away, it just brakes down into tiny strands that remain present in the soil.
And that so called "compound" stuff? I can somehow understand it with park benches. It at least keeps stuff out of the landfill and reduces the amount of treated wood. But computer cases? End of the recycling for all the material, in a case where one could easily use pure materials. Just use steel, aluminum, or PP. Put QR codes or something on the material and offer free recycling or a discount like with toner cartridges.
Some things just need to be uncomfortably close to the sun before it will degrade...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
But when I went to that article, I found, "Polypropylene is liable to chain degradation from exposure to heat and UV radiation such as that present in sunlight."
Wait a minute...did you recently write an article for 16 concerned scientists?
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
You're right to point out the serious issues of trying to recycle mixed polymer plastics. While we're all familiar with downcycling, your post reminded me about the costs of separation processes, and I thought i might drag up my old book. From Humphrey and Keller's Separation Process Technology "Plants commonly have from 40% to 70% of both capital and operating costs in separations."
Polymer blends provide desired properties from their individual components, but the amount of energy that would be required to break those down and at a desired purity (not considering the minute amount of catalyst often consumed in the polymerization process as well as flame retardants and other additives fuzzyfuzzyfungus pointed out ) just makes it too costly to break down the polymer blend into the purity levels that companies want in their raw materials.
And some things are built far better than they were in ye olden days - cars being the best example. Show me a car from the 50s, 60s, or 70s that could go 100,000 miles with just oil changes and brake pads. Show me a 5 year, 50,000 mile warranty from back then.
Perhaps cars aren't the best example. At least in the US, for a time cars were used to be specifically designed for planned obsolescense. For example, the Ford model T was a highly reliable rugged car that used advanced technology and materials and manufacturing techniques of the era to achieve that reliability. Unfortunatly the US car makers eventually decided that a consumption business model would be more profitable than a manufacturing based business model. US car makers then designed cars to wear out and seeded extensive dealer and parts distribution networks to capitalize on this business model.
When the Japanese decided they wanted to enter the US market in the '60s they didn't have all the parts distributors and repair resources that the incumbant US manufacturers had, they also had tax and distribution expenses to deliver products to the US, so they had to design their cars to last longer and be more reliable to justify higher initial product prices and repair prices to penetrate the market. The consumers eventually caught on to the value proposition for this business model and this led to the Japanese car manufacturers caputuring a larger part of the market in the '70s and '80s (the oil prices spiking during that time favoring the smaller Japanese cars didn't hurt either). After suffering major market declines, the US manufacturers essentially had to up their quality game to remain competitive which is why you see all the high quality cars from all manufacturers today.
It wasn't because the car manufacturers couldn't do the high reliability before (they started out that way), it's because they thought the planned obsolescence business model allowed them to make more money (sell, it cheaper, make spare parts, and encourage them to replace the product sooner). It's only after the Japanese car companies forced the US manufacturers away from that model that we get to where we are today.
Since this is partially made of paper, (and plastic), would it catch fire if it is too close to a heat source, ie. a CPU
My i3 runs really hot in my laptop and I feel like it will melt the case. (well actually Sony told me that it could catch fire by way of an update and it should never be put on a bed for long periods of time[no air flow])
I feel like this would catch fire even more, and my case is completely plastic...
You only said, "Polypropylene isn't something that is bio-degradable." You didn't say anything about biodegradation in landfills. Perhaps you were confused between anaerobic degradation and biodegradation in general. Perhaps you thought all landfills functioned under Subtitle D of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, but this is not the nineties. Everything from bio-reactors to surface churning is used regularly in many modernly operated landfills in hopes of capitalizing biodegradable materials (and not just those deep tubes attached to methane turbines).
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
It's not like truly biodegradable plastics made from corn or potato starch wouldn't already exist.
s that measuring to the near or the far side?
The consumers eventually caught on to the value proposition for this business model and this led to the Japanese car manufacturers caputuring a larger part of the market in the '70s and '80s (the oil prices spiking during that time favoring the smaller Japanese cars didn't hurt either).
I totally buy into your thesis, but even Japanese cars of the 70s were a pile of steaming dung compared to even American cars of the 2010s. You get better reliability, much much much much better performance (just try getting a 70s Civic up to highway speed with a full load!), and much less maintenance (no points to set, no carburetor to mess with). And the most amazing thing is that you can still get something like a Versa for $11,000. The little tiny 1971 Honda 600 was about $1500 ($8000 in today's dollars) for much less car... and I mean that both literally and figuratively. No crumple zones, no airbags, no air conditioning, 0-60 in never with it's whopping 36HP. You could instead compare the 1975 Honda Civic, but that only had 50HP and was $2200 or so, but you could at least fit a Western adult in it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
On Recycling I defer to the expertise of Penn and Teller
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzLebC0mjCQ
http://www.tecnaro.de/english/arboform.htm
paper production waste turned into a replacement for injection molded plastic.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Material science, tighter clearances through improved machining (5w-20 oil usage), and the invention of computer controlled fuel injection are the three core innovations that have lead to engines with an improved milage life.
And yes, carbs that run rich at cold temps tend to wash away the oil from the cylinder wall. Not much, but enough to increase wear levels over time.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's not like truly biodegradable plastics made from corn or potato starch wouldn't already exist.
That's why it's such a scam that "oxo biodegradable" can be called biodegradable at all and trick people into it.
I saw this story and right away I thought of...
Edward's Tomato computer
But she probably used a REAL cardborard box for the casing....
P.S. If you haven't watched COWBOY BEBOP, at least watch the FUNNIEST episode of it I've seen: MUSHROOM SAMBA (episode 17)
Watch it dubbed in English...IT'S HILARIOUS!!! (^_^) \o/ :o) :D