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...
I'm not a 'build my own home' kind of guy, but after watching this video, I would absolutely explore the use of rammed earth as a building material if I were in the business of building my own home.
The environmental benefits seem like a slam dunk, and the striations in the finished walls are gorgeous.
Hempcrete?
The hempcrete blocks make me think a whole lot of straw bricks, a pretty old composite technology - which falls into my frequently-reinforced observation that the more environmentally friendly a technology is, the more likely it is to be an updated version of technology that humans were using a thousand or more years ago.
Here the 'hempcrete' is really hemp hurd mixed with lime. The lime then absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as the hempcrete sets.
Hemp has long been put forth as a renewable resource with fibers that can be useful in lots of ways.
If you're interested in learning more about hempcrete...
Alan Wiseman's The World Without Us has a chapter titled "Hot Legacy" that explores our efforts to create warnings that will last at least 10,000 years into the future and will tell future archeologists that the interesting stuff they've found at some of our nuclear waste repositories should not be explored.
Much of the research is being done at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project is New Mexico, USA, and it's that work that SciShow details in today's video.
I remember that the Wiseman chapter also mentioned the placement of various magnets around the site as a warning that something was at least weird in this location. The video doesn't mention that, and I'm surprised because I found that one of the more interesting ideas.
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.
In the summer of 2023, our field trip from the Salt Lake City ASM summer teacher camp was to WNDR / Checkerspot.
When the trip was initially described to me, I thought we were going to see how snowboards and skis are made. I'm not a winter sport guy, so I figured it could be interesting but not necessarily my scene.
When we got there, though, I found that WNDR - the winter sports equipment maker and retailer - wasn't the real business. The real business was Checkerspot, a materials company that was producing polymer raw materials from microalgae as a replacement for petroleum sourcing.
That company needed some way to demonstrate the utility of their materials, so they found a consumer-focused industry with high margins and a strong environmental conscience among its consumers. In the Salt Lake City area, skiing and snowboarding made sense for them because the final products - the snowboards and skis themselves - are high users of polymers in their composite materials, and the people who buy tend to be willing to spend a little more to buy environmentally friendly products.
The tour was outstanding, and I highly recommend getting to see their process if you're ever out in Salt Lake City. You can see some of their facility in this next video.
I love that this is a week-long research project/workshop for high school seniors. I know that we don't do anything nearly that intensive in our material science course at Princeton - partially because of time constraints and partially because we don't have anything that would test concrete's compression strength with any accuracy.
Does anybody know of similar experiences that near you that we could recommend for our high school students?
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.
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| Source - Recyclingedu |
But scientists from the University of Amsterdam claim to have found a way to separate cotton from polyester and leave both as usable, recyclable products. The process seems chemically simple, soaking the blended fabrics in concentrated hydrochloric acid so that the cotton decomposes into glucose - which can be used as a monomer for further repolymerization - and leaving the still-polymerized polyester to be reformed into fabric.
Sounds great to me. Hopefully it'll be scaleable, because - as quoted in the article...
Textile production is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions, more than international flights and maritime shipping combined. This new method could reduce emissions, conserve resources, and lessen our dependence on virgin materials by making recycling easier and more efficient.
Seven or so years ago a non-profit group known as The Ocean Cleanup launched System 001 (aka Wilson) into the Pacific Ocean to begin cleanup on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a high-concentration 'soup' of plastic between Hawaii and the Western Coast of the United States.
Initial results were - by their own description - promising, though they did have some "unscheduled learning opportunities" leading to the creation of System 001/B then on to System 002 (aka Jenny).
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.
Sugar glass itself isn't the solution to single use plastics.
It's too brittle and too water soluble.
But it sounds like the composite of sugar glass (isomalt) and sawdust - particularly with a waterproof coating - might be a promising possibility.
This video is from 2009, so some of the details are admittedly a little dated, but the overall concepts - that we need to reduce our usage of materials in spite of the business community's desire for us to increase our usage and many governments' business-friendly leanings - are as relevant today as they were fifteen years ago (as I type this, anyway).
The channel has continued to make videos, posting their most recent (as of me typing this on July 4th, 2024) one in June of 2024, and they have a website with information on how to get involved in their campaign to decrease materials usage - particularly plastics and materials that end up in landfills.
I toured an asphalt research lab when I helped lead the second year ASM camp at Rowan University a few years back. Before that I'll admit that I hadn't put much thought into the different compositions that make up asphalt roads or the research that went into 'perfecting' the recipes used in road building.
Today's video introduces us to Green Asphalt, a company that is taking asphalt removed from roads and processing that asphalt into a reusable product, preventing hundreds of thousands of tons of asphalt from landfills every year.
I think I wrote it a few weeks back, but man, we make a lot of waste.
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.
I am both hopeful about and horrified at the prospect of enzymes that will break down plastics.
I'm hopeful because the man-made polymers that we have been creating and covering our world with for decades now are going to have to be broken down somehow, sometime. If decomposers are beginning to be able to process them into harmless - or even beneficial - products, that's great.
...but we have a lot of currently in-use polymers that we don't necessarily want to start breaking down into gray goo just yet.
...and if we find a way to make polymers break down more easily, will that just encourage us to make more of those polymers rather than stopping the production of them sooner?
I was at Indian Lake in northern Ohio recently and saw a vehicle/machine driving back and forth in the water about twenty feet out from Oldfield Beach. When I asked what the machine was doing, I was told that it was chopping up and supposedly harvesting invasive pondweed (details of the plan here) that was plaguing the lake because of its shallowness and prevalence of fertilizer run-off from nearby farms leading to blue-green algae blooms and near dead zones.
I don't have any idea what they're doing with the pondweed that they harvest from Indian Lake, but I feel like I might was to put those folks in touch with the subject of today's video as he seems to have found something to do with unwanted aquatic plant growth.
Today's fascinating, possible miraculous composite: ferrock.
From CertifiedEnergy...
Ferrock is created from waste steel dust (which would normally be thrown out) and silica from ground up glass, which when poured and upon reaction with carbon dioxide creates iron carbonate which binds carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the Ferrock.
Roughly 95% of the Ferrock is made from recycled materials, Ferrock is both stronger and more flexible than normal Portland cement, allowing it to be used in highly active environments where there is a consideration for seismic activity.
From ScienceDirect...
At 28 days, the strength of Ferrock concrete exceeds that of conventional concrete by 13.5 percent for compressive strength, 20 percent for split tensile strength, and 18 percent for flexural strength.
From the University of Arizona...
"This all started from an accidental discovery in a lab, which is actually the way it usually goes," [Ferrock inventory David] Stone says. "That was back in 2002, and I included as much as I knew in my doctoral dissertation. But the work goes on. It has taken years to get just a basic understanding of the chemistry involved. But this shouldn’t be surprising, since scientists are still trying to figure out Portland cement and they’ve had 200 years.
"I am into this for the long haul. Time is on our side, since in this era of global warming unsustainable processes like cement manufacture will have to give way to greener alternatives."
As always, I am guardedly hopeful but skeptical until I start seeing Ferrock showing up in buildings.
I've been to Butte, MT and stood in the shadow of that smelter smokestack.
The legacy of mining in Butte is...complicated.
Clearly the city wouldn't be what it is without its mining past. The richest hill on Earth made this city - at one time, not now - the largest city between Chicago and San Francisco.
But that same mining industry poisoned the land all around that hill, pumping the products of the smelter as high and far as possible from that giant smokestack.
I've posted about the EPA-lead cleanup from the mining industry before, and apparently Anaconda, MT is happy with how the cleanup is going, but it sounds like some of the folks in Butte aren't so happy.
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| From the CNN article |
Wind energy might be the solution - or at least part of the solution - to our energy problems. We absolutely need to stop burning things (methane, oil, coal, wood, trash, retired Beanie Babies) to make energy. That is not in dispute.
One of the things that is in dispute, however, is how to deal with the waste from retired wind turbine blades. From the same article, "[b]lade waste is projected to reach 2.2 million tons in the US by 2050. Globally, the figure could be around 43 million tons by 2050." The blades are, as a CNN article writes, "made from fiberglass bound together with epoxy resin, a material so strong it is incredibly difficult and expensive to break down."
Recycling the themoset resin is challenging, though a company named Vesta "has been working on in partnership with Aarhus University, the Danish Technological Institute and US-based epoxy company Olin, uses a liquid chemical solution to break down the blade into epoxy fragments and fibers. The epoxy resin is then sent to Olin which can process it into 'virgin-grade' epoxy"
There are other possible solutions mentioned in the article - pyrolitic separation of the resin and fibers allowing both to be reused, chopping the composite blades into fragments to then mix into cement, and...well...not much else.
A C&EN article explores the same issue and adds in an option of repurposing the blades rather than recycling them, showing an image of a playground made of decommissioned blades in the Netherlands and saying that they have also been turned into bus shelters and other public structures. The article also reports that there are companies exploring making the blades out of more easily recycled materials, though little detail of what those materials could be are provided as the materials and processes are still being devloped.
