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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?"
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'
What does that even mean?
"Trully recyclable" is a typo, what they mean is that some materials can be reused, infinitely and economically for the same purpose. Examples would be copper or aluminum. Many materials are not recyclable, but they are downcyclable which means that every time you reclaim them the end product is a raw material for a lower grade product. Water Bottles for example get downcycled into lower grade packaging which in turn gets downcycled into garden furniture which gets downcycled into concrete supplements. Plastic is probably one of the most serious and damaging pollutants in the modern world. The oceans are full of it and it clogs up beaches around the world in enormous quantities. Finding a substitute that is either biodegradable or truly recyclable would be very important. But then of course you already knew that, you just couldn't resist letting out your inner spelling nazi. Nevertheless, thank you for this opportunity, it's been fun treating you like an idiot.
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....
It is our God-given right to throw plastic away. What kind of America would this be if I couldn't just chuck my non-biodegradable products into the nearest ditch!
Quit your social engineering. What are you, some sort of communist?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
Plastic is truly recyclable. It is just a lot cheaper to pump new oil out of the ground than to properly separate out the hydrocarbons. See also monomer recycling
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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 !
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."
Well, it's my 'God Given Right', to buy stuff that doesn't break, not ever. Buy it once, last a lifetime.
Fuck recyclable, give me government mandated, cut the testicles off the manufacturing executives, life time warranties.
Let's see evolution in action, want shoddy products out of the market, let's remove the evolutionary opportunities of people who make shoddy products.
Last a lifetime, don't need no recycling, we'll have a whole lot less rubbish to deal with. For you recyclers I will accept the compulsory recycling of packaging of life time warranty products. Now that's from the gut grump old man thinking ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
And when I'm done suckin' down those grease ball burgers I'm gonna wipe my mouth on the American flag and then toss the Styrofoam containers right out the side, and there ain't a God-damned thing anybody can do about it. You know why? Because we got the bombs, that's why! --Denis Leary
First they came for the styrofoam...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Why do we always subsidize stupid shit and rarely any of the things that are good for us or the planet?
You know what would make it cheaper? A goddamned government subsidy.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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.
Well, it's my 'God Given Right', to buy stuff that doesn't break, not ever. Buy it once, last a lifetime.
Fuck recyclable, give me government mandated, cut the testicles off the manufacturing executives, life time warranties.
YES! This plan sounds like Planned obsolescence to me..In five years,your computer's case starts to fall apart.
Let's see evolution in action, want shoddy products out of the market, let's remove the evolutionary opportunities of people who make shoddy products.
Last a lifetime, don't need no recycling, we'll have a whole lot less rubbish to deal with. ;D.
I agree...Steampunk for all that lasts a lifetime!
Then they came for the lightbulbs...
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."
A "product" used to hold a kind of connotation that it's the last and final solution you will ever buy. So from that angle, there were hardy materials used and life-time warranties issued in some cases. And they really were robust. Take my 1960's Sunbeam toaster my mother handed down to me. These days it's a whole other ball game. Technology is such a fast moving target that the "product" in question is already obsolete the second the design is finalized and well before production starts. This pace of progress is being pushed by the producers as equally as it's being pulled by the consumer. No one corporation is to blame for this. It's a force of nature unto its own created and nurtured by modern society.
All that said. Who cares if my computer is 100% recyclable. It know my current MacBook will be replaced in a year or so, and the next one replaced some four years later after. My modern material possessions are no longer for keeps.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
You hit the nail on the head. That Sunbeam toaster is still useful, but don't use mom's refrigerator, even if it is still in new condition... a brand new refrigerator would pay for itself in very short order due to the energy savings. Computers, phones, and other modern electronics progress so quickly that "durability" need only be measured in years. Who the hell would still be walking around with a brick phone, even if it still worked and the analog network were still running? For that matter, who would use a Star Tac, which was the iPhone of 1998? Who wants my 1980 23" cabinet Zenith TV?
A kitchen should last 30 years, not a piece of electronics.
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Let's get real here, I'm talking grumpy old man, stuff dies within one month of the warranty expiring and your talking ninety day warranties. I basically gave up on coffee makers, bought a manual grinder and a french press, fuck em, I wasn't going back to the store to buy another locally branded, manufactured in China coffee maker every bloody quarter ;P.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I just ( this year ) bought several VISIO 22" TV's to replace the old NEC Multisync VGA monitors I have had in use for 20 years.
The Multisyncs still work. But they are not nearly as sharp, nor would they work as a TV, and a heckuva lot heaver. I am still wondering what to do with the multisyncs.. I will probably take them apart for their high-voltage video and deflection transistors, as well as a handful of high voltage diodes, capacitors, and various magnetics. Their 20 year old CRT's are all suffering from cathode emission degradation, subsequently can no longer give as sharp of image as they once did. My hat is off to the engineering team who designed these things. They have done their job very well.
It looks like my old LaserJet 2 will go when its toner runs out. Its plastics are getting quite brittle after 20 years exposure to ozone. It prints graphics at a glacial pace compared to my later machines. It has been a good machine. I doubt its replacement will last as long, but then, neither will I.
Top of the list goes to Toyota, who made me a car some 35 years ago, that has hauled me half a million miles with little more than oil changes and brake pads. The car shows the wear of old age which I attempt to disguise with new paint. The key is so worn it barely stays in the lock, but the car runs like a top. Its a simple little car: carburetor, points, manual transmission. I figure that car will be like the grandfather clock in the song that runs till the old man dies - in this case... me.
At the bottom of my list is the clowns who designed the valving for my kitchen sink. They did a great job concealing the leakage from a failing seal so it would drip somewhere I would not see it. I smelled it one day, when I had growths of mold and mildew all over where the water had puddled for years under the kitchen sink. Neatly hidden under a shelf. Major pain in the arse to fix.
Clowns of like ilk designed the shower valving in the shower, so leakage would be directed back through a little decorative tube into the wall where I would not see it. I did a little pre-emptive hacking with some putty and dammed up the little tube so that any leakage would be forced to drip out at the handle harmlessly falling down to the shower drain.
Just a little foresight in the design phase can sure save a heckuva lot of frustration for everyone else.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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.
If nobody ever bought anything, there would be no economy.
The people in charge of producing this would build enough of your infinitely-lasting deviced to last a few generations and be sacked. I suppose there would be some work for repairment or something, but with such durability
The only way this would work is if you paid 50 times more money to have something last 50 years.
Besides, what exactly do you own that is so crappy?
My laptop is 6 years old. Its only problem is that it's only got 512 megs of RAM, and I can still get RAM to upgrade it.
It was never high-end - Intel graphics and all of that - and yet it can run the OpenSim server and Second Life viewer simultaneously with acceptable performance (I am doing an MSc. on virtual worlds). Come on, an MMO server and client with realistic Physics simulation, a scripting engine, a MySQL database and 3D graphics?
My cell phone is turning 11 one of these days. I have a working 20 year old TV set, though I lost the remote somewhere in this freaking huge messy house xD
I have 20 year old clothes that don't look worn. Sturdy Doc Martens boots as well.
I have no idea how old my dishwasher is but the standard size detergent bricks, or what you might call them, don't fit anymore and the paint on the dials is coming off.
My fucking coffee maker is from the 60s. It used to be my grandmother's. Ditto for my room heater.
I have beautiful chandeliers on my ceiling that must date back to the 1930s. They were my great grandparents'.
Ditto for my house and most of my furniture. These days people like all sorts of "modern" IKEA crap with "design", well, my antique hardwoord dresser with a marble top and brass insets is worth more than all of their IKEA crap put together.
I have a painting that was my great-great-grandfather's, and his 19th century townhouse is still in the family. And a nice stone house back in the original village we came from, that was at the very least my great-great-great-grandfather's, though my family tree in that village has been traced back to the 1600s, and only stops there because that's when they started keeping records. (Welcome to olde Europe)
My 100% solid stainless steel cutlery similarly dates back from 1959, around the time when my grandparents got married, and I still have some tin cutlery from my great-grandparents as a keepsake.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
"Lifetime" means "lifetime of the product".
Or just use a lot less of it...
If your talking computer cases, then stick with standard cases like the ATX standard... I have an ATX case which is over 10 years old now, and has been through several motherboards in its lifetime. Also, this case is mostly made of metal, and contains relatively little plastic.
Years ago when i bought a bottled drink, it came in a glass bottle and a portion of the price was refundable once you returned the bottle... That bottle was then thoroughly cleaned, refilled and ultimately put back on the shelf. The truck that brought the next delivery, also took back the used bottles.
Now, glass or plastic bottles are smashed up and melted down, using enormous amounts of energy, if anyone bothers recycling them at all (which there is very little incentive to do without the refund you used to be given).
Many products these days also come with far too much packaging, everything comes in its own plastic tray which just ends up in landfill and is carried away from stores in plastic bags. I would rather the stores still let their customers take cardboard boxes, they are far more convenient for carrying in the car than plastic bags.
Things like meat and vegetables used to come in paper bags, now they come in plastic packaging...
The amount of packaging i go through just in a week is absolutely insane.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
While that does make a lot of sense, it would just never work under the current economic system...
If they can't sell you new products or charge you for repairing the ones you have, how will the companies continue making a profit? It's in their interest to sell you an unreliable product, then charge you again for repairs and replacement parts before selling you a completely new product once the original one is judged beyond repair.
Also some markets are moving fast, for instance i have an old VAX built in the 80s that still works, but it is simply useless for modern day computing tasks.
On the other hand, selective reuse of certain components is possible.. I have an ATX case from the late 90s that i've upgraded the motherboard in several times, and I use an SGI keyboard from a similar vintage...
If you mandate lifetime warranties, then pretty soon the companies providing the warranties will simply go under as there would be too few new product sales to cover the ongoing warranty cost. The only thing that could practically work is a rental model, where you pay monthly for the product and the supplier has to repair it should it fail. Under this scenario not only would they have a continual source of income, but would also have an incentive to produce reliable products in order to reduce their repair costs.
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And of course, there is a censoring issue. All old things that we see are good quality, simply because everything that broke has been thrown away.
[FUCK BETA]
YES! This plan sounds like Planned obsolescence to me..In five years,your computer's case starts to fall apart.
Yes, and if you complain, you'll get a terse reply saying "don't put it into the sun, then".
In a world with limited resources and billions of people already missing out, do you really know how deeply disturbingly insane it is to mass produce products that will purposefully breakdown because it is more profitable. Truly psychotically insane.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Now, glass or plastic bottles are smashed up and melted down, using enormous amounts of energy, if anyone bothers recycling them at all (which there is very little incentive to do without the refund you used to be given).
It's still a lot less energy than would be used making the glass from scratch, and using recycled plastic to make garbage bags makes economic and energy use sense too.
Same with aluminium cans - making alunimium from bauxite is horribly energy intensive compared to melting aluminium that has already been refined.
I'm with you on the reuse of cases and power supplies, but how many people feel confident building a PC from scratch? You know it's easy, I know it's easy, but most folk would rather buy new than have to think and learn.
The "alloy" mentioned in TFA reminds me of the lacquered papier-mache that was used extensively in the 19th century for making jewellery boxes etc. - the world turns, and nothing is exactly new.
It is our God-given right to throw plastic away. What kind of America would this be if I couldn't just chuck my non-biodegradable products into the nearest ditch!
A cleaner one?
Joking aside, if you really wishes to see how bad it can get when everyone uses cheap one-time plastic bottles, bags and wrappers and everyone just throws it aside after use, visit the semi-rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa. After a while you won't complain that the streets in town is full of plastic; you'll realize that the streets is a compacted mass of plastic and mud, flattened by thousands of feet and baked in the sun...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Good point! I never actually thought about that, but it is a serious case of selection bias.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Well yes, welcome to capitalism...
A system that encourages business to think only about their own short term profits, and not about long term sustainability.
A system that encourages exactly what you describe, because there is more profit in selling more products and having working reliable products in the hands of consumers reduces demand for new ones.
A system that encourages improving the efficiency of your supply chain, so that ultimately all your goods will be mass produced by robots and the minimum of expensive staff to manage them... The end result being mass unemployment and noone able to afford to buy your products.
A system that discourages long term planning, because someone else will easily be able to undercut you in the short term and drive you out of business, rendering your long term planning useless.
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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
Fuck recyclable, give me government mandated, cut the testicles off the manufacturing executives, life time warranties.
Actually Paul Hawken, one of the founders of Smith and Hawken, had a somewhat similar idea, only it was a bit more self-regulating. He suggested that many things we buy then throw into the waste stream could instead be leased, ultimately from the manufacturer.
Take a laptop. A typical laptop lasts about three years, maybe five. But suppose you didn't buy the laptop, you leased it under an arrangement where the manufacturer is obligated to take the actual physical laptop back and pay for its disposal. This *internalizes* the cost of disposal for the manufacturer. It's no longer a cost somebody else has to worry about, so dealing with the cost of disposal becomes a concern in the design of the product.
As a result a manufacturer might choose to use an easily recyclable material for the laptop body, say aluminum instead of polycarbonate. The manufacturer would better be able to recycle polycarbonate too. Polycarbonate products are labelled with a "7" which means "other"; this makes it tricky to recycle in the waste stream because it's mixed in with other miscellaneous plastics; when returned to the manufacturer the materials would sort themselves.
We can add the warranty angle to this too. You wouldn't need a warranty; if a device became unusable because of a defect, you'd return it to the lessor who'd have to refund you the balance of your lease. Not having to deal with returns is a major incentive for making quality products. Back when telephones were leased, they were built like tanks.
Hawken's idea is one of those interesting one that *could* work in some conceivable world, but it's not clear how we'd go about transforming the current world in to one of those.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Pretty cool that you have a half-million-mile car! You are either being modest in your claims for care of the car or you are one lucky SOB :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So... copper or aluminum computer cases? That's whack!
I drank what? -- Socrates
a manual grinder and a french press
My grinder is electric, but no press here: just a cone with coffee paper and a boiler. That's it.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
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.
That old 70's Merle Haggard song "Are The Good Times Really Over For Good" where he bitches like a sad old fart about how much things suck these days always cracks me up. One of the lines is something like "a car used to last 10 years, like it should." Little did Mr. Get-Off-My-Lawn realize that cars weren't getting worse they were getting BETTER. A car that only lasted ten years now would be considered a lemon. The Japanese kicking the U.S. auto industry in the head was the best thing to happen to them since Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You're not alone - musicians are easy prey for this fallacy. Martin made thousands and thousands of factory produced guitars in the twenties and thirties, and of course they now have a legendary reputation simply because only the good ones are still around.
[FUCK BETA]
My friend's dad was going on and on about steering alignment - his old GTO, he claimed - he could take his hands off the wheel and drive straight for a mile on the highway. Nowadays, he continued, they can't get the alignment right.
I asked him how many miles he'd get out of a pair of tires on his GTO and he said somewhere around 12,000. I asked him if the wear was even and he said not unless you rotated them and flipped them. I told him that the reason his GTO flew so straight was that the tires had more toe-in, so the wheel was self-centering but that this cost him tire life, and that if he likes he can have the mechanics do the same thing to his current car but it'll be hell on his tires. I'm not sure if he believes me or not, but he did stop talking about it :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Communist.
You should be using the $1/cup single shot coffee makers. Didn't you get the memo? Apparently more coffee was being poured down the drain then drank. Solution: cups of coffee that cost as much as pots and involve disposable plastic cups.
Seriously, I'm with you. But my haterid of the frogs led me to a Brazil press. Microwaveable too.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You mean the space heater globes that give off a nice glow?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just get close to the Mexican border. Driving south on I-5 is like a slow descent into shit. Every mile that goes by there is more trash on the shoulder.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Well, maybe a little modest.
It has had two complete brake re-do's, that is complete changeout of the entire braking system.
It needs a re-upholstery job bad. I have been making do with seat covers for years, but you really hope never to see what's under them.
Two paint jobs and ready for the third.
Two water pumps, an alternator, and a radiator - and I could consider all of them kinda minor repairs the way this car is made. Not much more problem than changing a headlight.
Oh yes, a dozen or so light bulbs, batteries, occasional points, spark plugs, and tire changes because the old ones rotted... the car is not heavy so I really have to work on it to wear a tire out.
All in all, I really like that old car. It shows beautiful quality of design.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Convenience of a good manual grinder, there is a cork to seal of the area bellow the grinder and a seal around the rim. Grind a bit extra and put the whole lot in the fridge ready for the second cup. Then of course there is the Zen of grinding coffee, focusing on a smooth grinding rhythm as you listen to the water boil, all absent the extreme noise of an electric grinder, finish the grind just after the water has boiled.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Do you have an oil tank as well as a fuel tank? :)
What are you going to buy when it dies? Or do we not speak of that?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.