You're Being Lied To About Ocean Plastic | Truth Complex | Business Insider

The widening gyre...

Yes, there's a garbage patch in the center-ish of the Pacific Ocean. 

That garbage patch is not anything worth looking at, though. It's an area of higher than average concentration of plastic waste, but it's not something you could walk across or would have trouble boating through. Even a higher density area isn't necessarily a high density area.

As this video reveals, the most common photos attributed as being of the garbage patch are not of the garbage patch. They're of near-shore, highly polluted areas - which might actually be easier to clean up than the garbage patch would be - if we even should clean it up.

The video goes on to explore the sources of plastic pollution (hint - mostly not littering), the value of recycling (limited but worth doing), the role of big corporations in producing plastic waster (suck it, Coca Cola), the problems with microplastics (bad, very bad), and the need to reduce more than reuse and recycle.

These kinds of videos are way too easy to find on YouTube.

Plastics bad...we need to use less of them.

...and I write that as I sit beside of plastic bottle of Coke Zero Cherry that I'm drinking today.

Why Miners Risk Limbs To Carve Mountains Of Limestone In Egypt | Big Business | Business Insider

Every time I see things like this I am reminded of how fortunate a life I am living.

I don't think it's too radical an idea that we might need to cover some sustainability in our materials science courses. When the limestone from this quarry is being used to make cement and paper and tiles and much more, we might want to rethink whether we actually need to use that much limestone - and if we do, how we might want to pay a little more so that the people who are manning those quarries can actually survive the process.

How To Mine Gold From Electronics | World Wide Waste

As always and as we should probably preface every conversation that we have about materials, we should lean into the reduce side of the triangle way more than we do.

But, until we get that perfected, we need to figure out better ways to recycle those materials that we use.

In this video, an Aussie company is working on e-waste recycling, particularly toward the recovery of the precious metals: palladium, gold, copper. The activity series comes in at 2:15 when the narrator says, "palladium and gold are still stuck in the solids. They're harder to dissolve." 

He really means that they're harder to react and doesn't explain that it's because of their extremely low positions on the activity series that this is true.

"For the precious metals, you need something with a little more oomph."

Yeah, you would.

This company goes on to use - according to the video - microorganisms that consume and absorb heavy metals allowing the company to concentrate those and sort them from the waste. That's fascinating, and I love the idea that they went looking for microorganisms that had evolved to thrive on mine waste instead of trying to 'invent' a new process chemically. Brilliant, gents!

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I also dig the gold nanoparticles appearing purple. I've read about red glass from gold nanoparticles before, but hadn't heard about purple. Upon further reading, it looks like the distinctions from red to purple depend largely on the size of the nanoparticles. 

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150 grams of gold from 1 metric ton? 

That doesn't seem like much, but when they go on to say that open pit gold mining nets 3-5 grams per ton of rock, that looks way more profitable.

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And the the video gets to the environmental justice side of things. There is a cost to our consumer culture. We in the wealthy west just aren't always the ones who are paying that cost.

Man, I hope that some of these phenomenal processes that we've heard about over the decades come to fruition and that they don't all go the way of anything into oil.

Risk List 2015

I'll readily admit that I'm not 100% sure that I understand what rare earth elements are all about. While driving around on vacation, I listened to most of this On Point radio show about them, and I'm still a bit dodgy about which elements they are, why they're useful to us, and why the heck China apparently owns all of them.

What I do know, however, is that loads of politicians and talking heads say that rare earth elements are desperately important to loads of our defense and manufacturing sectors and that China apparently has the entire world of rare earth elements in the palm of their hand.

So says that 2015 Risk List, ranking the relative risks to our supply chains from disruptions in various element production.

What I do know is that we need to get us some of that there reform.

Source - http://www.bgs.ac.uk/downloads/start.cfm?id=3075 

Corrosion will cost the US economy over $1 trillion in 2015

$276 Billion

That's the number that we quote in our summer ASM teachers camps PowerPoints as being the annual cost of corrosion in the United States.

Of course, that's a number from a 2002 survey by the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE). That's almost a decade and a half old at this point.

So I went hunting for a more current number.

G2MT laboratories - out of Houston and describing themselves as 'not just a lab: the next generation of metallurgy' - posted a fairly comprehensive analysis that says the number in 2015 dollars is more like $1 Trillion in annual corrosion costs in the US. The analysis goes on to explore those direct - and also indirect - costs.

Shift Happens 2014

Be careful when enunciating the title of today's video.

I used to show Shift Happens when I taught the ASM teacher camps. It's a nice, tidy, five minute educational bomb, and it spurs a decent amount of conversation about how we need to teach our students, something that isn't the overt purpose of our camps but that is certainly subtly embedded in the course of the week.

But the statistics in that original is nearly ten years old now, and the statistics we becoming dated when I started using it in 2010.

Here's an updated version from 2014. No citations are provided, of course, so take any facts with a grain of salt.

The Sand and the Fury

Our civilization is literally built on sand. People have used it for construction since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians. In the 15th century, an Italian artisan figured out how to turn sand into transparent glass, which made possible the microscopes, telescopes, and other technologies that helped drive the Renaissance’s scientific revolution (also, affordable windows). Sand of various kinds is an essential ingredient in detergents, cosmetics, toothpaste, solar panels, silicon chips, and especially buildings; every concrete structure is basically tons of sand and gravel glued together with cement.

Our appetite for expansion, for building, for creation is nigh on bottomless.

And it seems like our sources of sand for that expansion should also be bottomless. There's the deserts of Africa, Asia, North America - even of Antarctica. Heck, there's enough sand in my swim trunks from my recent trip to the beach (more on that material science connection later). But it turns out that desert sand (weathered by wind) and river sand (weathered by water) aren't even remotely the same when it comes to building. As the Wired article explains, "Desert sand generally doesn’t work for construction; shaped by wind rather than water, desert grains are too round to bind together well."

That leaves us dredging rivers and bays and oceans for more and more sand, diving deeper ("he thinks the river’s sand will soon be mined out. 'When I started, we only had to go down 20 feet,' he says. 'Now it’s 40. We can only dive 50 feet. If it gets much lower, we’ll be out of a job.' ") and evend destroying entire island ("Sand mining has erased at least two dozen Indonesian islands since 2005. The stuff of those islands mostly ended up in Singapore, which needs titanic amounts to continue its program of artificially adding territory by reclaiming land from the sea. The city-state has created an extra 130 square kilometers in the past 40 years and is still adding more, making it by far the world’s largest sand importer.")

We need to, as always, remember that building is a zero-sum game. Everything that goes up has to come from somewhere.

And often, there are huge environmental and human costs in getting that materials from that somewhere.

It cost 1.7 cents to make a penny this year, and 8 cents to make a nickel

During every mention of new versus old pennies, the cost of coin production comes up. Invariably, I say something vague about the cos of production of a penny having risen over the years until the production cost out-stripped the value of a penny - meaning that the government was losing money on every penny it produced.

I've never actually done the research on those details, however. I just keep telling students that they can look it up. I don't think any of my students ever took me up on that offer, though, because none of them came back with evidence asking for extra credit - as I'm sure they would.

Thankfully The Washington Post recently published an article on our government continuing to lose money every time it mints a penny - or a nickel, even.

I did not know that the production cost of a nickel was higher than the five cents for which the government can then 'sell' the nickel.

Just in case The Post chooses to put the article behind a paywall or into an archive at some point, I've grabbed it into Word then published it via Scribd.

As Infrastructure crumbles, trillions of gallons of water lost

My material science students read (and listened to) this NPR story this week, the day after I heard it on the radio. In her written response to the article, one of the students wrote that she was surprised that two water mains that far apart (I'd also shown video of a water main breaking on UCLA's campus this summer) could coincidentally break at the same time. I explained to her that water mains broke every day all around the country. I typed water main break into Google News and came up with hundreds of hits within the last couple of days.

Water mains break all the time. It's a cost of using metal pipes, that they will eventually corrode and crack and turn into pretty spectacular sinkholes and floods.

My students asked why we didn't just use something that wouldn't corrode, like glass.

Apparently I have some work to do when we get to the ceramics chapter.