What would a world look like if recycling reached 100%?
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I would like to think it would wait till i'm ready.
I suppose you want lube, too?
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I suppose you want lube, too?
I want the easiest path to have the most pleasant shit in the morning i can possibly have in the future.
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I agree but it doesn't have to be that way.
wrote last edited by [email protected]100% is not realistic physically. You should phrase the question as a world where everything that's possible to be recycled is recycled, and where it isn't we go back to materials that are naturally recycled or reusable. Basically a world where plastics and other materials that are one-time use are banned. It's a great topic, as we don't remotely realize how much we throw away. The scale is huge. The change in what is affordable or possible would be huge too.
We could do a lot better, and it would be impactful. Some things have to be disposable in our modern world though, at least with current technology. Just medical use alone is a big example.
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Thats the natural progression no?
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Humans can be recycled.
And are delicious?
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And are delicious?
you are putting words in your mouth.
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In all honesty plastics should be phased out since its in every guys sperm.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Well in that case I have no problem "phasing out plastics" on the nightly.
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Thats the natural progression no?
Then clearly we're resisting "natural" progression, whatever that means. It's definitely against the direction for economic growth, and that runs the world. Line go up.
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I try and do my part.
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you are putting words in your mouth.
wrote last edited by [email protected]No... I believe that's a foot. With BBQ sauce.
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[off topic?]
"The Midas Plague" by Fredrick Pohl.
A light-hearted science fiction story where 100% recycling, free atomic power, and robot labor have combined to create a glut of consumer goods. So, the higher your status, the less you use. Folks in the ghetto have ten houses and a thousand robot servants, while the Beverly Hills elites live in shacks and play cards for matches.
Fun read.
we can already sorta see this in fashion
in ye olde days, the more bits and baubles and lace and ruffles you had on your clothes/shoes/furniture, the richer you were
since the advent of industrialized consumer goods, flashy embellished things are marketed to the working class meanwhile the bourgeois drop mega money on plain color or simply patterned gowns and tuxes, absurdly minimalist furniture, and unadorned shoes that showcase whatever exotic material they're made of
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No... I believe that's a foot. With BBQ sauce.
Ah, so we’ve reached the ‘fine dining’ stage of recycling.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
Instead of focusing on the efforts of individual persons and households, I think more effort should be focused on industrial symbiosis - identifying industrial waste and side streams that can be useful inputs into the products of other industries, and connecting those industries.
For example, you might have a local electricity-generating station that takes some of the steam that's created as a side effect of their process, and sends that steam to an oil refinery located next door. The oil refinery has a water hook-up and sends regular water to power station for their power generation, but they also send their treated effluent water for the power plant to use in cleaning as well as stabilizing fly ash, and they also send over their flare gas as an extra energy source for generating power.
The oil refinery could send it's excess gas to a gypsum board manufacturer just down the road; the gypsum board manufacturer could also get most of it's gypsum from the power plant's sulfur dioxide scrubbers.
The power station could also send more of it's excess steam to a nearby pharmaceutical manufacturer; the pharmaceutical manufacturer could send some of the bio-sludge waste it produces to local farms as fertilizer, and the rest of the sludge might get processed into biofuel for the power station. Hot water from the pharmaceutical plant could be sent to the local wastewater treatment plant, which generates sludge, which could be sold to a soil remediation firm.
The power station could use it's excess heat to heat a bunch of local homes, some local greenhouses, and then they could also send some more excess heat to a fish farm. The sludge from the fish farm could be used as fertilizer at local farms.
The power station's fly ash and clinker could be sent to roadbuilders and cement manufacturers, and the oil refinery's recovered sulfur could be sold to a sulfuric acid manufacturer.
Such a theoretical symbiosis could prevent 200,000 tons of fly ash and clinker and 80,000 tons of scrubber sludge from going into a local landfill; 130,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 4,300-5,300 tons of sulfur/sulfur dioxide being released into the air; and 1,000,000 cubic meters of sludge headed to either the landfill or the sea.
Oh, wait - that's not fantasy, that's the Kalundborg Eco-industrial Park in Denmark. It's not 100% recycling, but it's fucking glorious.
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Plastic recycling is a lie, sure.
Recycling other materials like aluminum, steel, copper, glass, and a ton of other materials is perfectly sound. Oil companies just piggybacked on the success with those materials to sell their lie.
Not as much as you think. Many of the recyclable materials you mentioned are “contaminated” with the contents they were used to deliver because folks don’t wash them well enough. It’s not their fault; we’re told to “rinse” the materials, but they really have to be fully washed, a tough task for many of those cans with crevices and ridges that are often missed. Other contaminants include throwing in what you think is the correct metal or plastic, but it’s not, and that ruins a whole batch.
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I want the easiest path to have the most pleasant shit in the morning i can possibly have in the future.
They already mentioned the slumber shitter 5000 how much easier do you want it than ‘not needed’???
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Not as much as you think. Many of the recyclable materials you mentioned are “contaminated” with the contents they were used to deliver because folks don’t wash them well enough. It’s not their fault; we’re told to “rinse” the materials, but they really have to be fully washed, a tough task for many of those cans with crevices and ridges that are often missed. Other contaminants include throwing in what you think is the correct metal or plastic, but it’s not, and that ruins a whole batch.
Raw materials come from the ground. By your standards of “contamination” aren’t raw materials much more contaminated?
A lot of work goes into refining glass, aluminum, steel, copper etc. A lot of impurities have to be removed to make those materials for the first time.
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Raw materials come from the ground. By your standards of “contamination” aren’t raw materials much more contaminated?
A lot of work goes into refining glass, aluminum, steel, copper etc. A lot of impurities have to be removed to make those materials for the first time.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Metallurgy isn't my field, but here's an educated guess...
There are different kinds of contaminants. In raw ore you largely have silicate rock and metals. In recycled material you have relatively pure metal (alloys), and a large variety of volatiles.
Now with ore you can grind it all into sand, sift it, and smelt all the heavy grains. The rock should mostly just separate from the metal, these are just phase changes. But with recycling, those volatiles are going to burn and some are going to react with the metals, changing the chemical makeup. And with ore, you basically know what minerals you're working with. With recycled materials, it's anyone's guess. Does this can contain some food residue? Or an oil? Perhaps chemical cleaning agents? Is another plastic container stuffed inside?
There's a lot of variables with recycled materials, I imagine it's hard to predict how some of those variables react.
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Recycling is a fraud. It was invented by the oil and plastic industry to pass the blame to consumers and shield themselves from repercussions. While some plastics CAN be recycled, its only numbers 1-3, every other plastic cannot be recycled or its so expensive that companies had no incentive to do it, and this still doesn't include paper that also has a limit on what it can be recycled to.
Paper can be recycled 7 times. Every time the quality degrades because the fibers get shorter. The last recycle is purely for toiletpaper or crêpe.
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Not as much as you think. Many of the recyclable materials you mentioned are “contaminated” with the contents they were used to deliver because folks don’t wash them well enough. It’s not their fault; we’re told to “rinse” the materials, but they really have to be fully washed, a tough task for many of those cans with crevices and ridges that are often missed. Other contaminants include throwing in what you think is the correct metal or plastic, but it’s not, and that ruins a whole batch.
Comment from a German specialist in a thread about this from 2017:
Die nicht recykelbaren Reste wie Lebensmittelreste, Farbauftrag oder irgendwelche Etiketten verbrennen in der Schmelze und treiben oben auf dem flüssigen Metall als Schlacke, die einfach abgeschöpft und entsorgt werden kann.
Translation:
The non-recyclable residues, such as food scraps, paint coatings or labels burn off in the melt and float to the top of the molten metal as slags, which can simply be skimmed off and disposed of.
