When I see videos like this I get at least a little hope for the concept of recycling.
In today's video we follow post-consumer HDPE jugs - like a translucent milk jug - through sorting, cleaning, melting, injection molding, and eventual assembly into a park bench.
I was lucky enough to teach one of our summer teacher ASM camps in Butte, Montana - at Montana Tech - the first time that city held such a camp. My time in Butte was great, and I am thrilled to have been able to visit Berkley Pit, a major feature in today's video.
This video is slightly about the history of Butte's mining industry but much more about the revitalization of the city's environment and the reclaiming of the environment around such a huge mining operation.
There's a huge amount of clean-up to be done, but they've come a long, long way from a city surrounded by barren hillsides with the US's tallest free-standing masonry structure, one designed to spread the 75 tons of arsenic-laden dust produced daily a little further from the smelter.
Cold welding is frickin' weird.
Richard Feynman wrote (or said in a lecture - I'm not sure which), "when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to 'know' that they are in different pieces of copper. When there are other atoms, in the oxides and greases and more complicated thin layers of contaminants in between, the atoms 'know' when they are not on the same part."
But two metallic pieces that don't have those thin layers between them - primarily because they've been in space and rubbing against each other - can spontaneously weld together to become a single piece of metal.
It's possible to get that to happen on Earth, but it's not easy because of all the pesky oxygen we have around us all the time.
Metals are way weirder at the quantum level than we think they are, man.
My wife just passed along that there's a facility near my school that has begun to accept post-consumer Styrofoam for recycling. Apparently they just got a densification machine that allows them to accept Styrofoam and compress it to 1/60th of its original volume so that the polystyrene can then be used to make something new - as they say in their facebook post - like 'insulation, park benches, and more'.
That makes me happy because I'm trying to be good with my plastic waste, and it's really hard to find a styrofoam recycling facility.
Today's video shows that densification process, using heat and pressure to turn the expanded polystyrene into what look like nurdles to me. Those nurdles can then be turned into just about anything that polystyrene can be used for - primarily picture frames in today's video.
Please reduce your plastic use.
If you can't do that, please reuse the plastic.
If you absolutely can't do that, please recycle - not wishcycle - it.
