The materials in our world are rarely pure. Our steels are alloys. Our polymers contain dyes and plasticizers. And apparently our food packaging - like chip bags - are composed of nearly a dozen different polymer and aluminum foil layers glued together.
Trying to get those materials apart again to recycle them is currently all but impossible to recycle.
If only those layers could be separated again...
Multilayer packages - MLP's - that's why.
It's not a tough answer at the most basic of levels. We've taken multiple materials - each of which accomplishes something useful for the overall chip package - and have fused them together in ways that make them nearly impossible to separate again and recycle.
Now, how are we trying to recycle them in spite of all the steps we've taken to make sure the materials couldn't easily separate?
Step one is to find a way to separate the un-separateable through heat, pressure, and high pH.
From there it's mostly down to regular recycling, but that first step is a doozy.
At some point in my material science and chemistry courses, I speak bluntly to my students that most research suggests that man-made polymers are bad for us.
Some are worse than others, but most research on the effects of polymers on humans seems to suggest that there are bad effects from most man-made polymers. Some are minorly bad, but others - like the family of PFAS - are more obviously and persistently bad.
The video above is short and has a direct message: DuPont is bad (or has acted badly).
The longer video below - from Veritasium - is far longer but is much, much more informative.
If this sounds familiar, you might've seen a semi-recent movie about this story, Dark Waters.
"All you need to do is melt some sugar."
Yeah, there's a lot more than that involved in making sugar glass.
You need to make sure the 'glass' remains amorphous so it stays translucent - which is is a little tougher than it seems.
And the sugar shouldn't actually be sucrose but rather isomalt.
...and the stuff you make isn't exactly safe to break across a friend's head.
Not a lot of science presented in that first video, so let's try another one.
We produce a great deal of waste. That's not a very debatable statement.
This video visits a London restaurant that is attempting to have zero waste from his restaurant.
From making the pendant shades out of waste seaweed to forming their own pottery on site and glazing that pottery with ground up waste wine bottles, the restaurant attempts to have nothing thrown away from day to day.
They ferment much of their food scraps that would normally be wasted and thrown away.
They upcycle their plastic bags into serving plates.
Somehow the ice cream is made from waste bread.
All in all, it's a place that I would love to study more but that I'm not sure I would actually enjoy. Some of the cuisine seems to be awfully fancy, and I'm not sure that my tastes are in line with.
Check out Silo if you're ever in London - and if you can actually get a reservation.
A Failure of the Imagination from ENGLAND your ENGLAND on Vimeo.
The process of making shellac is scientifically fascinating, ridiculously complicated, economically important, and ethically questionable.
Like so many products that are 'natural', shellac amazes me because I have absolutely no idea how anyone would have thought to go through this process to turn bug secretions into a furniture sealant, a citrus fruit polish, a candy coating, and so much more.
I'd eat that for a dollar!
The idea that we can create structural color - akin to that found on the wings of butterflies - using a diffraction grating and some tempered chocolate is pretty amazing.
Diffraction grating isn't too expensive, and chocolate is pretty cheap.
Looks like a fun summer project.
(Or you could just buy yourself some holographic chocolate directly.)
Today you get a whole bunch of videos about making salt (all different from previous salt making videos.)
It seems like such a simple thing - talk salt water from the ocean and boil it down - but there's a lot more to the science of making salt including removing the calcium and magnesium impurities, allowing the crystals to grow to the desired size, and sorting those different crystal sizes.
Who knew that the rate of crystal growth would affect the size of the crystals?
More after the jump...
Some explanations are so remarkably simply that I never would've thought of them.
I've heard of hopper crystals in bismuth for years. I always assumed that they were studied by a scientist named Hopper. In this video, Adam Ragusea explains that they're actually called hopper crystals (not Hopper crystals) because they resemble the shape of a hopper that feeds ingredients into a production line.
And that's just the surface level of new knowledge that I got from this video. Adam spends much more time trying to explain why making hopper crystals of salt - the ones he shows and that I have in my cabinets at home as Maldon salt - is hard to do. Apparently they only form in super-saturated salt solutions and then only stay hopper-shaped pyramids until they either bump into other crystals to form a raft or get heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the solution and in-fill with more salt.
If only they could get them to grow in space - as an International Space Station experiment shown in the video recounts...
The above video is a very quick, fairly vague explanation of the difference between tempered and untempered chocolate.
Dan Souza, the editor of Cooks Illustrated magazine, illustrates tempered chocolate as a rigid, highly structured stacking of kitchen chairs as compared to an 'untempered', random arrangement of the same chairs.
I would appreciate a little more detail, maybe a micrograph or two, but what you see above is all Dan's giving us this time. Dan has, however, given a little more detail about chocolate in the video after the jump which includes a recipe for millionaire shortbread that requires tempering of the chocolate topping, something Dan shows how to do using a microwave.
