The most notable exception to the downcycling rule is aluminum. When you melt aluminum, there are no molecules to degrade, so you get back the same quality metal you had originally, not counting the removal of impurities.
Even with the energy required to remove impurities, aluminum recycling is still much less energy intensive than refining virgin aluminum from bauxite (over 90%). So don't throw your beer cans in the regular garbage; recycling them makes a bigger difference in terms of energy savings than recycling anything else.
The problem with current plastic recycling is that you reduce the length of the polymer molecules each time you recycle, reducing the quality of the plastic. So you can't turn PET bottles into PET bottles indefinitely; you have to turn them into lower-quality plastic items such as plastic speed bumps. After a couple of cycles, the plastic ends up in a landfill.
And that only applies to thermoplastics (which can be melted). Thermosets, which cannot be melted, are much more difficult to recycle, and are "downcycled" much farther in quality.
The beauty of the "giant microwave" process is that it turns plastic recycling into a truly cyclic process, instead of a delayed linear process. If you transform plastic back into its raw material, you can recycle it into plastic of equal or greater quality (upcycling). You keep it out of the landfill for much longer (not accounting for people who don't bother to recycle).
Balderdash! Intelligent design is as much science as Loch Ness monster biology, crop circle research, deterministic astrology, and retrophrenology! How can we have a balanced science curriculum without these colourful subjects?
Maybe in twenty years when pot has moved beyond prohibited to decriminalized to taxed and regulated.
Tying hemp to pot is what is preventing hemp from being legalized in the USA. It's legal in Canada, and is becoming quite profitable. The legality of hemp in the US has nothing to do with a perceived threat to public health, and everything to do with a perceived threat to business: first to the cotton industry, now to corn and wood pulp.
Do you know what would happen if a hemp farmer hid a small plot of marijuana in his field? The plants would cross-pollinate, resulting in a small area of slightly poorer-quality hemp surrounding the worst-quality pot anyone had ever smoked--worse than the ridiculous attempt to grow medicinal marijuana at the bottom of a mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba. Hemp farmers would not grow pot. It would be a miserable failure.
...an ideal world would not need printers at all. Save the trees, man.
Save the trees by getting all of our fiber needs from hemp. No, not the kind you can smoke; the kind that grows like a weed (haha) on even the most marginal farmland, and provides not only high-quality fiber, but oil that can be used as biofuel.
In an ideal world the model would be unsustainable...
In an ideal world, ink cartridges would not be disposable; the manufacturer would have to take them back for refilling or disposal. Same with the printer itself. If that were the case, the quality of everything would go way up because the manufacturers would have an incentive to make them easily refurbishable. Instead, printers end up in landfills a year or less after people buy them because it's just as cheap to buy a new printer as to replace the cartridges.
Now you can also be a farmer who's trying to make a living while crop prices keep dropping
Or you can switch your remaining crops to corn... but that's why the Feds are encouraging all biofuel to be derived from corn, isn't it? To prop up the agricultural sector with a not-so-stealthy subsidy.
As of the most recent numbers, it looks like Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Nigeria for the top five, with 4.55 million barrels of the top five from the Americas and 1.46 million barrels from "Arab oil interests". So the submitter has a point, just not as much as he thought.
Are CDs produced by British music companies actually manufactured in the UK? Or are the masters sent to a facility in another country with lower overhead costs, then re-imported? There are quite a few countries that would be appropriate... China, maybe?
Also the same as college textbooks. A textbook that costs $160 here in Canada costs $20 in India (one specific example). If you can find the right online clearing house, you can order the Indian one, pay the shipping, and save $120. Different industry, same ripoff. The publishers price their textbooks to be as much as they can possibly squeeze out of the buyers. If they can afford to sell many thousands of these books at the Indian price, the pricing obviously has nothing to do with the cost of publishing the book.
But I don't see why it's a problem for a teacher to get drunk from time to time...
Being a former junior high teacher, I'd say the real danger would be if teachers were not allowed to get drunk and let of steam quite frequently. Trust me, no one drinks like a gang of junior high teachers on a Friday night--or needs to.
Not the buying guidelines at my previous company. What they (actually "he") actually said was "We can't afford that."
Then again, that wasn't specifically aimed at new computers (to replace the nine-year-old machines still on 30% of users' desks); he said that about everything.
"New server drives? That's too expensive." -- "Okay, then you have to delete everything in your 3.5 GB inbox." -- "Write up a requisition for new server drives."
"AutoCAD upgrade? That's too expensive." -- "Okay, but mega-customer #1 won't buy anything from us anymore if we keep sending them drawings in R13 format," (I'm not kidding) -- "Send me a proposal for the upgrade."
"Pay your replacement what we're paying you? That's too expensive." -- "Okay, but you're going to get some kid who can't write, and doesn't know what a command line is." --...and they did.
How much of that market share is down to corporations who bulk-order generic beige boxes based on buying guidelines that are fifteen to twenty years old?
More importantly, buying guidelines that say "we need Office, therefore we need Windows", "it's what everyone else uses", "it's the industry standard", "we don't want to retrain everyone on a completely new system"
All of those points have some merit, but none of them are insurmountable. On the other hand, the managers who fear retraining hassles the most are the ones who haven't figured out that it's possible to put e-mail somewhere other than your inbox, that resizing a picture in Word does not reduce its file size, that file != folder, and that an effective presentation does not consist of 120 slides with copy-pasted paragraphs and tacky clip art.
We need to act on this whether we're certain or not.
I use this analogy: Let's say someone 100 feet away is aiming a gun at you. Taking the weapon's capabilities, his aim, wind, and other factors into account, one group of experts figures he has a 10% chance of hitting you, and a 2% chance of killing you. Another group of experts claims he has a 75% chance of hitting you and a 50% chance of killing you. You tend to believe the first group.
Would you let him shoot at you?
When do you reach a point where the consequences are unacceptable, no matter how low you think the risk is?
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No one expects the Spanish Emigration!
Thank you! I'm here till Thursday! Try the veal!
"Prepare for trouble..."
Well, you'd get a lot of kids involved in science.
Yes, the first of the five R's. Five? While only the first three are typically publicized, waste handling consists of five R's:
The five R's should be followed in order to maximize the lifecycle of an item before it ends up in the landfill.
The most notable exception to the downcycling rule is aluminum. When you melt aluminum, there are no molecules to degrade, so you get back the same quality metal you had originally, not counting the removal of impurities.
Even with the energy required to remove impurities, aluminum recycling is still much less energy intensive than refining virgin aluminum from bauxite (over 90%). So don't throw your beer cans in the regular garbage; recycling them makes a bigger difference in terms of energy savings than recycling anything else.
The problem with current plastic recycling is that you reduce the length of the polymer molecules each time you recycle, reducing the quality of the plastic. So you can't turn PET bottles into PET bottles indefinitely; you have to turn them into lower-quality plastic items such as plastic speed bumps. After a couple of cycles, the plastic ends up in a landfill.
And that only applies to thermoplastics (which can be melted). Thermosets, which cannot be melted, are much more difficult to recycle, and are "downcycled" much farther in quality.
The beauty of the "giant microwave" process is that it turns plastic recycling into a truly cyclic process, instead of a delayed linear process. If you transform plastic back into its raw material, you can recycle it into plastic of equal or greater quality (upcycling). You keep it out of the landfill for much longer (not accounting for people who don't bother to recycle).
Balderdash! Intelligent design is as much science as Loch Ness monster biology, crop circle research, deterministic astrology, and retrophrenology! How can we have a balanced science curriculum without these colourful subjects?
Matt, please pay attention to the proper use of "it's".
Feeling grammar-nazi-ish today... I wonder if it has anything to do with privacy-threatening laws being passed in Germany?
Tying hemp to pot is what is preventing hemp from being legalized in the USA. It's legal in Canada, and is becoming quite profitable. The legality of hemp in the US has nothing to do with a perceived threat to public health, and everything to do with a perceived threat to business: first to the cotton industry, now to corn and wood pulp.
Do you know what would happen if a hemp farmer hid a small plot of marijuana in his field? The plants would cross-pollinate, resulting in a small area of slightly poorer-quality hemp surrounding the worst-quality pot anyone had ever smoked--worse than the ridiculous attempt to grow medicinal marijuana at the bottom of a mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba. Hemp farmers would not grow pot. It would be a miserable failure.
Save the trees by getting all of our fiber needs from hemp. No, not the kind you can smoke; the kind that grows like a weed (haha) on even the most marginal farmland, and provides not only high-quality fiber, but oil that can be used as biofuel.
In an ideal world, ink cartridges would not be disposable; the manufacturer would have to take them back for refilling or disposal. Same with the printer itself. If that were the case, the quality of everything would go way up because the manufacturers would have an incentive to make them easily refurbishable. Instead, printers end up in landfills a year or less after people buy them because it's just as cheap to buy a new printer as to replace the cartridges.
Or you can switch your remaining crops to corn... but that's why the Feds are encouraging all biofuel to be derived from corn, isn't it? To prop up the agricultural sector with a not-so-stealthy subsidy.
As of the most recent numbers, it looks like Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Nigeria for the top five, with 4.55 million barrels of the top five from the Americas and 1.46 million barrels from "Arab oil interests". So the submitter has a point, just not as much as he thought.
Are CDs produced by British music companies actually manufactured in the UK? Or are the masters sent to a facility in another country with lower overhead costs, then re-imported? There are quite a few countries that would be appropriate... China, maybe?
That's not so bad. Try going into a bar in Dublin and saying how much you love that part of the UK.
Also the same as college textbooks. A textbook that costs $160 here in Canada costs $20 in India (one specific example). If you can find the right online clearing house, you can order the Indian one, pay the shipping, and save $120. Different industry, same ripoff. The publishers price their textbooks to be as much as they can possibly squeeze out of the buyers. If they can afford to sell many thousands of these books at the Indian price, the pricing obviously has nothing to do with the cost of publishing the book.
Actually, that's a pretty good idea. One small tactical nuke at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should do the trick.
Being a former junior high teacher, I'd say the real danger would be if teachers were not allowed to get drunk and let of steam quite frequently. Trust me, no one drinks like a gang of junior high teachers on a Friday night--or needs to.
About 1779?
Tho tongue pierthing ith jutht for thock value?! Thit!
Not the buying guidelines at my previous company. What they (actually "he") actually said was "We can't afford that."
Then again, that wasn't specifically aimed at new computers (to replace the nine-year-old machines still on 30% of users' desks); he said that about everything.
"New server drives? That's too expensive." -- "Okay, then you have to delete everything in your 3.5 GB inbox." -- "Write up a requisition for new server drives."
"AutoCAD upgrade? That's too expensive." -- "Okay, but mega-customer #1 won't buy anything from us anymore if we keep sending them drawings in R13 format," (I'm not kidding) -- "Send me a proposal for the upgrade."
"Pay your replacement what we're paying you? That's too expensive." -- "Okay, but you're going to get some kid who can't write, and doesn't know what a command line is." -- ...and they did.
More importantly, buying guidelines that say "we need Office, therefore we need Windows", "it's what everyone else uses", "it's the industry standard", "we don't want to retrain everyone on a completely new system"
All of those points have some merit, but none of them are insurmountable. On the other hand, the managers who fear retraining hassles the most are the ones who haven't figured out that it's possible to put e-mail somewhere other than your inbox, that resizing a picture in Word does not reduce its file size, that file != folder, and that an effective presentation does not consist of 120 slides with copy-pasted paragraphs and tacky clip art.
"I'm getting better."
"No you're not; you'll be stone dead in a moment."
"I think I'll go for a walk."
"Look, you're not fooling anyone."
"I feel happy..."
I use this analogy: Let's say someone 100 feet away is aiming a gun at you. Taking the weapon's capabilities, his aim, wind, and other factors into account, one group of experts figures he has a 10% chance of hitting you, and a 2% chance of killing you. Another group of experts claims he has a 75% chance of hitting you and a 50% chance of killing you. You tend to believe the first group.
Would you let him shoot at you?
When do you reach a point where the consequences are unacceptable, no matter how low you think the risk is?
No, but Ontario produces a sizable fraction of the pollution that gets dumped into them. Lake Erie isn't all Detroit's fault.
Oh great. Now I have stuck in my head, singing with a cylon voice...