Trash produced worldwide predicted to double by 2050 & recycling alone not enough to address methane emissions!
Let's examine some thoughts about these & related energy, water, recycling & trash topics since they have global environmental, economic & public health consequences & lots of profitable opportunities with more applied technology
E-waste & precious metal recycling of gold used to prevent electrical contact & tiny wire oxidation, complicated mixes in smartphones & internet of things devices & consumer electronics of all kinds.
Complex electronics are popular with good diffusion & mass adoption worldwide. These products often last less than 10 years, so a huge amount of e-waste created. Older computer e-waste had more copper & gold that was easier to feasible extract, while new e-waste a mix of polymer & ceramic & glass & metals thats much harder to separate into pure recovered product streams.
Using a combination of synthetic imaging technologies developed in medicine & aerospace & applying them to e-waste recycling of crushed board logic that contains the valuable precious & highly recyclable metals like gold & copper. Copper wire recycling & how to cleanly remove wire insulator fast & aluminum recycling from Apple computers unibody construction, wires & cables & all sorts of other things from airplanes & cars & more. The global chip shortage illustrates how compute products integral parts of many other mass produced products sold worldwide. Consider GPU mining of cryptocurrency & the end of life or EOL of burned up or antiquate graphics cards.
High speed optical, x-ray, fluorescent, NDT, back scatter, gamma camera & related imaging technologies on belts moving 3 metes per second moving millions of e-waste products through a high volume feasible e-waste recycling process that does not require government subsides to operate. The key here completely automated crush & separation & then sorting of the parts, ceramic, glass, metal, etc at high enough volume or thought put to make the process intrinsically profitable without public subsidies.
Cardboard & Paper & Packaging
Paper from news print & boxes shipping by Amazon & Ebay & Alibaba & packing materials vs mowing down more forests for virgin paper pulp processing. Eco-friendly paper recycling without harsh chemicals or water pollution. We already recycling a lot of paper products & brown paper acceptance increasing vs bleached white dioxin releasing process products. We can encourage each other to accept off-white paper products & brown boxes with simple graphics printed with soy inks & other simple to recycle ink that does not contaminate downstream recycling process.
Given the popularity increasing of E-commerce from Amazon Prime & Ebay & Alibaba, to the billions of other packaged products sold in retail settings. We are seeing more boxes produced & so its important to continue innovating paper & paper pulp processes for recycling paper fibers.
Fiber recycling must also not just address paper & boxes but clothing, since fashion products are one of the leading sources of environmental pollution, just behind oil refining in terms of negative impacts on Earth's biosphere. See the reason we must think about these things stems from everything on Earth being connected. Earth is a spherical shaped spacecraft orbiting a star called the Sun with a Moon that orbits the Earth. See science of astronomy & space science facts. Some pollutants enter the upper atmosphere & have global transport meaning that coal power in china can degrade air quality in America & India & Europe. Everyone on Earth must share the oceans & atmosphere, so air pollution a major issue given that everyone breathes air. Most people also embrace fashion, which gets us back to why clothing recycling important.
Metal Mining, Metal Refining, Scrap & Alloys
Smelting, refining, scrap metal recycling & electric furnace technology for lower operating cost especially on smaller scales. My personal tiny 12 oz ceramic crucible & propane torch metal melting of aluminum can parts & small copper wire scraps reclaimed from commercial recycling of fluorescent ballasts.
One of the reason that mining metals still happening because of the scale of mining operations that make raw metal element recovery from natural sources feasible. Some of largest machines in the world, mostly powered by diesel fuel, power the mining recovery side, while electric smelting furnaces are leading the way to cleaner feasible metal production.
Older furnaces using coke or coal are enormous emitters of SOX & NOX & particulate & metal dusts that contaminate areas around refining operations with toxic air quality, acid rain & soil contamination with metals. Coal power itself a major source of radioactive element release through the metal oxide particle emission & ash emissions. We have to move beyond burning carbon to decarbonization to make use of abundant renewable energy developed through ongoing increased scale of solar PV panel manufacturing & renewable wind & geothermal & hydro energy. Electricity moves at nearly the speed of light through metal conductive wires such that most energy consumed within fractions of a second of when it was made or we have a serious lack of energy storage in the world, at least a grid gigawatt scales for industrial electricity.
Metal alloys with more than 20,000 different combinations & more created daily by metallurgical research scientists as mixing different elements improve the performance & quality of the resulting product, giving product designers & manufacturers more options with mixed material production of vehicles & buildings & mass produced consumer products of other classes. Moving to the product stream of metals, we see alloying as the emerging technology of choice because of the flexibility it affords product designed with higher performance metals like low creep alloys for turbochargers & jet engines that can operate at high temperatures without stretching or deforming, since keeping their shape geometry important for the performance & longevity of the turbine blade engine system or turbocharger or similar device.
Trash to Energy, Hydrogen & Electricity
Energetic trash components & a renewed look at gasification process to extract syngas from trash, to produce trash crude oil base & hydrogen & methane & natural gas. Turning low grade plastics back into petrochemical oils they were made from or fuels or other polymers where peak strength not required.
Green hydrogen & fuel cells that utilized it essential to making cheaper abundant quantities of hydrogen to enable fuel cell electric vehicles to become less expensive & more popular. Today brown hydrogen still expensive because its made from natural gas & steam reformation process that energy & emission intensive & not fully optimized with harmonics & high voltage & other emerging techniques like photocatalytic decomposition of water with sun lit titanium dioxide panels. Platinum intensive fuel cells are the main way to make hydrogen & oxygen from water, while other electrolytic techniques uses photovoltaic DC energy with potassium hydroxide a domain of HHO generators used for special torches & by hobbyists experimenting with such systems, like me :)
Green hydrogen made with renewable energy essential for LH2 & LO2 rockets at BlueOrigin & others where best cleanest rocket engines only emit water vapor as emissions! Converting sea water into hydrogen & oxygen at an enormous scale can also help to lower sea levels, which are currently rising due to melting polar ice caps, a phenomenon associated with increasing global air pollution & climate change associated with human population increasing & materialization becoming popular worldwide. More people who want more things, to go to space in a cleaner sustainable ways, we need more green hydrogen made from water, & green oxygen made from water.
Mushroom Packaging Materials
Styrene packaging made from petrochemical waste monomer replaced by sustainable mushroom mycelium & paper pulp moulded liners & other innovative styrene free secure protective packaging designs emerging. Mushrooms are the recyclers of nature & mycelium packaging can be produced in a low temperature energy efficient way thats water efficient & clean & renewable. With similar strength to paper packaging products without cutting down the trees, the mycelium can be gown on agricultural waste & food waste bases & other other yard waste & biological debris, dead plant parts & fibers. We need to get going with this conversion to biologically inspired packaging materials made with mushrooms because these mycelium packages can biodegrade easier & turn back into soil & dirt & compost without complex processing, just same kind of compost used for yard-waste.
State Subsidized Improvements
Government subsidies like can & bottle deposits returned when containers turned in for bulb recycling in some states & not others, as an example, can be more broadly applied by all states to encourage recovery of cans & bottles, but through other financial mechanism, Government can also subsidized emerging recycling & innovating packaging materials development & manufacturing to help kick start that sector & move beyond doing business as usual with terrible deforestation & land degradation & water pollution as the consequence of not going forward with better ways. Sometimes the state has to invest in the public & help the private sector to develop new solution that compete with large entrenched players that control & dominate a sector. Its about helping new technologies become more broadly applied to make a bigger positive impact & to make the world better for people alive today & all future generations of people.
Magnet Recovery & Recycling
Rare earth metals from magnets like speakers in smartphones & iOT & stereo equipment & ear buds & headphones & bluetooth smart ear devices & hearing aids. Magnet are a interesting example of something that has exploded in popularity as part of COTS electronics & made from rare earth metals controlled by China, we can improve magnet recovery & recycling & reuse.
Battery Recycling
Battery recycling of lead already well developed, while lithium recycling still has plenty of room for scale increases & process improvements. Aluminum & copper foils & cobalt recovery help to make lithium ion battery recycling more promising. As electric vehicles of all kinds are increasing in popularity, long term battery recycling of lithium ions now made in gigafactory by the billion an important toxic for continual discussion, commercialization, innovation & applied technology.
NiMH & NiCd batteries are fading in popularity because lithium offers more energy storage at lower prices. Some applications demand the extended high & low operating temperature performance of NiMH like hybrid electric vehicles made by Toyota, Prius etc. NiCD able to give off amazing amounts of current for peak power applications in power tools & continues to be used where amazing peak current & deep cycling applications demand NiCD performance. In consumer products like cordless phones & solar landscape lights, NiCD replaced by Lithium Iron Phosphate or LiFePO4 technology thats lower voltage but much longer lasting than typical lithium cobalt oxide lithium ion batteries used in smartphones & NCA cells used in electric vehicles like Tesla Model 3.
Biodiesel from Used Cooking Oils
Energetic used cooking oils converted to biodiesel using methyl alcohol & sodium hydroxide or similar, cooked together at 55 C for a few hours while mixed & then put in large separator funnel to allow draining of the glycerin products out the bottom for collection & sale or other uses. Washing the biodiesel with water & few times to remove other water soluble contaminates that entered the cooking oil during food processing hot oil processes like deep frying & wok frying & pan frying etc
Diesel fuel used by commercial vehicles of all kinds & dominates the transportation energy of heavy transport & logistics & in other more refined forms like kerosene & JET A in air traffic. Diesel engines can run on all sorts of fuels, even used motor oil with a little gasoline added. Biodiesel offers a way to reduce petrochemical diesel use & switch over to a renewable used cooking oil feedstock base.
Biodiesel can be made on tiny scales as Project Farm on Youtube shows, or 10 L at a time as some farmers in poor countries (Youtube) made from wok oil recovered from the community, which they clean up & process to make biodiesel using simple plastic jugs & metal container, no special equipment, in a low cost way, look it up. Industrial biodiesel also made now & more widely available as blends with petrochemical diesel like B20, B80 & B100. Some Diesel engines operated in warm conditions can also run directly off vegetable oils
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