I really admire that you’re committed to recycling and waste reduction. Do you have any resources you’d recommend for me to learn more about what’s going on in that space and what’s being done to combat the acceleration of plastic and electronics waste?
I know it’s “not your job” to educate me, but everything I can find on the topic suggests that we don’t have a viable path to manage the accelerating growth of waste, and we don’t have very effective systems for recycling, so even recyclable waste is mostly just being dumped in landfills because it’s more “economical” to just keep churning out products from new materials. I’d be very happy for all of that to be wrong, so any credible source you can point me at to debunk that narrative would be very much appreciated.
waste reduction. Do you have any resources you’d recommend for me to learn more about what’s going on in that space and what’s being done to combat the acceleration of plastic and electronics waste?
Thanks. Challenging question. Department of energy map might be a good place to start to learn about battery recycling. As for e-waste in general there just isn’t a lot of movement in this sector that I am seeing. The process is labor intensive. So you don’t exactly need an automation guy if you plan to hire a thousand children. Very very generally if energy costs could be brought down by about half automatied processes would make more sense.
Material reduction, material conveying, bath it in the solvent that can strip the meat from your bones, run solvent through solvent recovery, what remains is the stuff worth recycling. It’s the same basic process that has been around since before my grandparents were born. We just keep making it safer, bigger, and more efficient.
I really can’t speak about plastic sorry. The last plastic recycling project I was on not only failed it failed back in 2019. I am sure there must be good resources out there to learn more. I did work on a scrubber that processed a bit of melted plastic but the amounts were so small a pure water based one could handle it, so not that interesting. If you want to know about that I can go into detail.
d be very happy for all of that to be wrong, so any credible source you can point me at to debunk that narrative would be very much appreciated.
It’s not wrong. I don’t know what to tell you. I feel like I am a doctor with a fat smoker deskjob having meth using patient. We have all the tools we need to solve the problem the issue is that we are prevented from solving problems.
I can easily go on a ten page rant of all the crap I see local governments, PEs, and sales people do to make sure that they don’t have to use their brains for even a second.
No one demands accountability from these projects, no one stops the river of dirty money, no one starts looking brutally at how the contracts are rewarded and the designs being used. Routinely, maybe even once a week, I see concrete guys trying to design electrical systems, I see sales guys make civil engineering decisions, I see used piece of crap parts off eBay being put in new systems because some shithead PE didn’t want to re-stamp.
The tech is there, the resources are there, the knowhow is there, the will is there. But if everything just works a lot of people would be upset.
Meanwhile despite none of what I am saying being new or novel or surprising the solutions to these second order problems are always bad. I am mocking you for your herb garden for a reason. It means so little compared to actually solving the issues, it is less than a drop in the bucket.
The single best thing you can do is apply for a job in my sector, the second best thing to do is start showing up to your local government meetings, the second to worse thing you can do is try to hunker down. Because guess what, that asshole rolling coal in his F250 is only mildly making the problem worse compared to what you are doing.
We solve society level problems on the society level. I can build machines that process more waste in a day than you will generate in your life.
Thanks for your candid views on this.
To be clear, our interest in subsistence farming is not intended to do anything to solve the problems we’re facing as a society. It’s an attempt to figure out how we might try to survive locally after the global supply chains collapse. We’re particularly researching what crops might be viable in a landscape that has been reshaped by the changing climate. Additionally we’re studying everything we can about community organizing and systems of self-governance that promote collaboration over individual greed.
This might all sound defeatist to someone like yourself who is still committed to fighting the good fight, but we see it as a contingency plan that our community’s ability to survive may depend on in the future.
