Waste Land - NPR article

Source - https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

I will admit that I am 100% confused by recycling at this point.

I think I can recycle paper, cardboard, glass, and aluminum pretty well. 

I take my aluminum cans to the local animal shelter where they supposedly make some cash from them.

I put my glass, paper, and cardboard (after tearing out the plastic windows in envelopes and tearing off as much sticker waste from the cardboard as I can) into my curbside bin.

But the plastics mystify me.

My local waste collector - Rumpke - says they can take, "Plastic Bottles (empty, crush, reattach lid): Bottles and jugs that have a small mouth and wider base, such as milk jugs, soda bottles, laundry detergent bottles, water bottles, shampoo bottles and contact solution bottles".

When I called them a couple of years ago and asked what they could take, the customer service person - clearly reading from a manual because she couldn't answer follow-up questions - told me they could take "#1-7 except butter tubs." 

#1-7 is pretty much everything, and I know flatly that they can't take styrofoam (foamed polystyrene - #6).

And now I see that Planet Money has posted a twenty-four minute story (audio and transcript - there's also a 4-minute summary from NPR) relating the history of the Resin Identification Codes (RICs) and the plastics industry's efforts in the 1970's to advertise their way out of plastic's imaging problem. Instead of finding ways to recycle plastics, they convinced us to feel better about plastics by letting us think they were making recyclable products.

Which was apparently crap.

But now they've promised that they're really going to recycle plastics going forward.

SULLIVAN: These days, Larry [Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry] spends a lot of time biking past the ocean. He's become deeply worried about its future, what it will look like in another 20 or 50 years, long after he's gone. And he thinks back to those years he spent at fancy hotels and conference rooms with oil and plastic executives. And he says what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should've been obvious all along. He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, as much virgin oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition. 

THOMAS: They were not interested and still aren't interested, as far as I'm concerned, in putting any real money or effort in the recycling because they want to sell virgin material. Nobody is producing a virgin product and wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material - that's their business. Every year, they want to say they produced X number of million more pounds because that meant their business was growing. 

SULLIVAN: And it is growing. We're making more plastic, buying more plastic, using more plastic. That's not going to go away anytime soon. But as the industry dusts off their new ads and makes their new promises, there is one difference. The difference this time is whether or not the public will still believe them.

2003 OSU PSA's GSD

I feel like the commercial is lacking in a dramatic arc for the guy listening to Glenn Daehn. Yes, Dr Daehn is dropping some serious knowledge, but the guy listening doesn't really respond with anything more than a slightly-glazed stare. He could yell, scream, even just saying a simple, "whut?" to earn his SAG paycheck.

My thought is that Dr Daehn has been on the weight loss kick for a lot longer than his new endeavor, LIFT, has been around. We'll get to more about LIFT in the next few posts, but for now let me just say that it's an effort to help us save money and energy by lightening up our materials a bit.

Dieting is always so hard...

The All-New 2014 Sierra DureLife Brake Rotors

They're touting the fact that "GMC also uses a heat-treating process called ferritic nitrocarburizing" in their ads?

I'm thinking that the percentage of people who see that commercial who have even the faintest inkling of what ferritic nitrocarburizing is can be safely rounded down to zero.

Jeep Grand Cherokee Manifesto Commercial

First off, the song is "God's Gonna Cut You Down" as performed by Johnny Cash. The video starring just about everybody but Cash is over here if you want to hear the whole song.

I knew you wanted to know.

The video - one-minute long - is officially an advertisement for a Jeep, but it uses patriotism and transfer about the great manufacturing history of America to make you think that if we made great things here once, the Jeep must be one of those things.

Which it might be, but that's not our point.

For me, the video is a nice, emotional call-out to return to manufacturing greatness, something that materials science just might help us do.

A Boy and His Atom: the world's smallest movie

On some level this is nothing more than a commercial for IBM.

On some other level, though, this commercial is pretty freaking cool. These scientists, admittedly paid by IBM, used an electron microscope to move individual atoms to then make frames in a stop-motion animated 'movie.'

In terms of materials science, the ability to build materials atom by atom, on a nanotechnology scale, may well be the ultimate destination of materials building, not waiting to see what how the atoms will combine on their own under temperature and pressure.

If only we could work atom by atom to perfect a material.

Bouncing bearings on liquid metal

Advertising is advertising. I think we all know that.

And the advertising demonstrations set up in sporting good stores aren't always the truest indicators of a particular piece of equipment's final performance. Yes, the materials shown probably perform the specific functions being demonstrated very well. Here we can see that the rebound of a metal ball off of liquidmetal's proprietary alloy as compared to the rebound from a titanium surface.

We have to assume that all the other variables - material thickness, cold or hot treating perhaps - are the same between the materials and that the two metal balls are also the same. If so, we can safely say that the liquidmetal does, indeed, provide a greater rebound (coefficient of restitution if I remember my physics correctly). Now, what does that mean on the surface of a golf club, in a tennis racket, or as a fishing pole?

That I can't definitively say from the limited data I have before me. I am glad, though, that their website does provide a little of the science behind the fact that the alloys possess ' an "amorphous" atomic structure, which is truly unique. By contrast to the crystalline structure, no discernable patterns exist in the atomic structure of the unique Liquidmetal alloys. As such, properties superior to the limits of conventional metals can be achieved.'

Has anyone actually used anything from the liquidmetal line?