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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?"
The PP should break down in sunlight and can be reclaimed.
Well, it did for a while.
Have gnu, will travel.
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...
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.
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".
> ...designed to fail?
That was "planned obsiolescence"[1]. It was evil. This is "biodegradeability". It is "Green". You are supposed to want your things to rot and fall apart. Creates jobs, you see. Buying stuff that is durable and using it until it wears out is what old people do. After all, you have to throw your 'pod away and buy the new model ever six months anyway, right?
[1] Not really, but that's what the popular press redfined it as.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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?
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.
make it out of chocolate and everyone will want it and have to buy new ones regularly.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
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.
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.
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
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).
Then they came for the lightbulbs...
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.
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.
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.