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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
Arrggggh!!!
Why can't the world be simpler?
We have dumped a bunch of plastic into the ocean. Bad!
Some people are trying to clean up that plastic from the ocean. Good?
Maybe...but it's more complicated than just "Good!" because there are tiny neuston (from wikipedia: "organisms that live at the surface of a body of water, such as an ocean, estuary, lake, river, or pond") that use those floating plastics to help stay afloat and on which they lay eggs, and removing all the plastic would remove a significant portion of their habitat...which might be bad for the environment as a whole.
So removing that plastic from the ocean might be Bad!
Arrrrrgggghhh!!!
I think I've made my opinion abundantly clear around here before: we have to stop using plastics.
Manmade polymers are bad for us and for our environment in almost every case.
I say all this from no moral high ground as I'm typing this on a laptop with a plastic case, plastic keys, and assuredly plastic components glued and soldered in ways that make it relatively impossible to recycle.
Today's article - from phys.org - states what seems like a pretty clear and undebatable conclusion: people are confused as to what biodegradable, bioplastic, and compostable mean, and that confusion might lead to even more plastic trash around our world.
Preaching to the choir there...Experts on all sides of the biodegradable battleground agree that beyond reducing use, governments need to set up better disposal infrastructure to ensure biodegradable plastics don't end up in oceans and on forest floors.
I wasn't initially excited to tour a research lab when I was helping out with our second year ASM teacher camp at Rowan University, but the research lab where they were working on different formulations of roadbed asphalt was surprisingly fascinating.
They went over the ingredients in modern asphalt and how they were adjusting the ingredients of the mixture to vary the performance in different climate conditions. It was a really interesting lab tour, easily the best of the three labs that we got to tour on that field trip.
Clearly there's a lot to learn about pavement, especially when I hear - from the above video - that asphalt roads can be recycled pretty much indefinitely with only minor additions along the way.
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.
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.
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| Source - bbc article |
Today's article describes an attempt to solve the sand shortage - at least partially - as well as to use some of the seemingly endless supply of plastic trash that we continue to produce in our world by replacing some of that sand with ground up plastic pieces.
There isn't much detail, and I would want to know a few things before considering plastic as a sand alternative...
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Glass is a generally a fairly environmentally-friendly material, being made primarily of sand, so the idea of reusing glass bottles to build homes after they were used for their initial, beer-transporting purpose is brilliant.
I wish it would have worked out...and I also kind of wish I had one of the WOBO bottles, but with only 100,000 of them having been made, I'm guessing the sell for a pretty penny.
The squishy black mess looks really gross, but I'm impressed at the ingenuity of turning the coconut husk waste into a usable fuel that can replace wood.
Anything that can be done to get rid of waste in landfills is a good thing.
"So far her factory has recycled 50 metric tons of waste this year.
"But Nairobi produces six times that amount of plastic trash every single day."
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"So I cannot say this is 'the' solution in terms of like it has the biggest impact and all that stuff, no. Does it have an impact? Yes."
...
Start playing my broken record - we make too much plastic / polymer waste. It's bad for us, for the environment, for the planet.
But at least some people are doing something to reuse the plastics that we already have.
Today's video shows a young woman in Nairobi, Kenya making paving bricks from recycled plastics and sand.
Is this 'the' solution? Probably not.
Does it have an impact? Yes.
You can get a way cheaper heat gun from Harbor Freight if you need one.
This project is just a different application of our in-class demonstration of inflating a milk jug using that same heat gun, but here once the HDPE jug is softened, it gets molded around a somewhat-heat-resistant skull and cooled to hold that new shape
Sound like a fun idea - and very appropriate for the spooky season that we find ourselves in.
I feel like I've posted about Glass Half Full before, but I can't find the post.
Maybe I've just meant to post about them because I think they're just about the coolest folks around.
I like to think of myself as a decently environmentally friendly person. I recycle and compost and all that, but I feel like an utter slacker compared to these folks.
[T]he plastics industry has waged a decades-long campaign to perpetuate the myth that the material is recyclable. This campaign is reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s efforts to convince smokers that filtered cigarettes are healthier than unfiltered cigarettes.
Last week I posted a couple of videos from these guys and commented that their set-up looked a little advanced for me.
The above video is a lot more my speed, true beginner stuff there. That's closer to the skills and tools that I have.
And if I scale this up, here's a video on how I might want to organize things...if...
I love this process...melting (technically it's softening not melting) HDPE on a panini press between parchment paper (they call it greaseproof, but that's parchment in the US) and pressing it into a mold looks like something I could maybe actually do.
So I started collecting lids since the beginning of the year. I don't have nearly enough, though, so I'm going to have to expand my collecting efforts.
Clearly their processing has gotten much, much fancier as the jewelry making video shows. They're on to injection molding, oven melting, and machined aluminum molds.
I'm thinking I'm a ways away from that, but I want to try this next year with my students.
