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SatyrService · M
this part impressed me
[quote]Greta has made a lot of changes in her own
life to reduce her carbon footprint. She doesn’t
eat meat, and she doesn’t travel by plane.
That’s why she travels around Europe by
train and went to North America on a special
type of sailboat. The boat, the Malizia II, runs
on clean energy. It uses wind power and
electricity from solar panels and hydroelectric
generators. It doesn’t put any carbon dioxide
into the environment. And, in October 2019,
she traveled by electric car in Canada partly to
protest Canada’s oil industry[/quote]
[quote]Greta has made a lot of changes in her own
life to reduce her carbon footprint. She doesn’t
eat meat, and she doesn’t travel by plane.
That’s why she travels around Europe by
train and went to North America on a special
type of sailboat. The boat, the Malizia II, runs
on clean energy. It uses wind power and
electricity from solar panels and hydroelectric
generators. It doesn’t put any carbon dioxide
into the environment. And, in October 2019,
she traveled by electric car in Canada partly to
protest Canada’s oil industry[/quote]
ArishMell · 70-79, M
@SatyrService I trust her sailing-boat is built from cropped timber, and rigged with cotton (canvas) sails and hemp ropes?
Cynical? Perhaps but all the attention on stopping crude-oil extraction for fuels is ignoring all the other things that need it as a raw-materials source. What worries me is that so far all the loudest public discussions / arguments / campaigning / policies have centred on fuel and electricity, and virtually ignored what will be The Next Big Problem: [i]materials[/i].
I am very dubious about that anti-meat drive. It seems to have been triggered by some report that turned out to have looked at heavy cattle rearing in parts of the USA not well suited to such farming; not at areas where animals can be reared and crops grown safely.
Cynical? Perhaps but all the attention on stopping crude-oil extraction for fuels is ignoring all the other things that need it as a raw-materials source. What worries me is that so far all the loudest public discussions / arguments / campaigning / policies have centred on fuel and electricity, and virtually ignored what will be The Next Big Problem: [i]materials[/i].
I am very dubious about that anti-meat drive. It seems to have been triggered by some report that turned out to have looked at heavy cattle rearing in parts of the USA not well suited to such farming; not at areas where animals can be reared and crops grown safely.
SatyrService · M
@ArishMell It’s also important to understand that we can have all the plastic we want just buy mining the landfills. Thermal depolymerization, can bring all that back to be used over and over again. There is such a thing sustainable forestry. And there is such a thing a sustainable production of animal protein.
ArishMell · 70-79, M
@SatyrService Generally, yes.
Though only the thermoplastics can be recovered for re-use as those, and they are; although so far at least the result is a peculiar mix not like the originals, and not suitable for many of the original purposes. A typical use for this is for timber substitutes for some building purposes, outdoor furniture and the like. I have cut pieces of it, and the interior is full of tiny gas-bubbles, and flakes of what is probably metal, etc.
I don't know what can be done with the thermosetting plastics, the synthetic resins; such as in the vast tonnages of glass- and now also carbon-fibre, reinforced materials. It is not recoverable for re-use as itself and I don't know if it is used for anything, e.g. pulverised to create a filler for other materials. These products cover all sorts: caravans and boats, building panels, wind-turbine blades, electrical insulators, components in domestic appliances.....
Mining the land-fills will also recover a heck of a lot of otherwise wasted metals including the copper, gold, silver and rare-earth ones in electrical and electronic goods merely thrown into domestic refuse rather than collected separately. The EU's "Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment" Directive and its national-law translations go a long way to reducing that loss; with for example Councils in the UK having various ways to collect such scrap, as well as metals generally, glass, plastics, paper and cardboard.
Many shops also now have battery-recovery arrangements - just a suitable container in which to drop small cells of any type. There is a very serious aspect to this, especially with the enormous rise in popularity of nicotine-vapour cigarettes. These, especially the so-called "disposable" forms, contain small lithium-ion batteries, safe when intact but already responsible for fires in homes and in refuse-collection vehicles.
I believe France is banning disposable "vapes" and it is being considered here in the UK, but we tend to be very slow to implement regulations even when generally supported and agreed.
.
Trees can certainly be grown as crops, provided they are so with ecological and aesthetic care.
Animals can be farmed sustainably too, in areas suitable for this. Already many British farmers are turning to better systems including something rather pretentiously called "regenerative" - simply returning to careful rotations of crops, fallow and animals. They've also found some plants edible to the creatures can be used as feed supplements to reduce the methane supposedly emitted in vast amounts. (Vast I wonder at, but all anaerobic fermentation of vegetable matter produces some methane, including by digestion by [i]any[/i] animal - we are animals too!) Their manure can be processed to a fertiliser while collecting the methane for a fuel. That does burn to water and carbon-dioxide but at least cyclically, since its source was the pasture grass.
.
I learnt of an unusual late-19C "recycling" industry recently. The scrap-metal industry and ship-breaking yards selling the recovered timber were already long-established by then; but here, a company in the Eastern English town of Thetford had found another line. It collected worn-out jute sacks, and pulped them. The jute pulp was moulded, baked and finished into low-cost, unbreakable household goods like trays and jugs, sold as "Thetford Ware". I suppose the modern equivalent is the moulded cardboard egg-boxes and other special packagings; but an industry whose time may come again?
Though only the thermoplastics can be recovered for re-use as those, and they are; although so far at least the result is a peculiar mix not like the originals, and not suitable for many of the original purposes. A typical use for this is for timber substitutes for some building purposes, outdoor furniture and the like. I have cut pieces of it, and the interior is full of tiny gas-bubbles, and flakes of what is probably metal, etc.
I don't know what can be done with the thermosetting plastics, the synthetic resins; such as in the vast tonnages of glass- and now also carbon-fibre, reinforced materials. It is not recoverable for re-use as itself and I don't know if it is used for anything, e.g. pulverised to create a filler for other materials. These products cover all sorts: caravans and boats, building panels, wind-turbine blades, electrical insulators, components in domestic appliances.....
Mining the land-fills will also recover a heck of a lot of otherwise wasted metals including the copper, gold, silver and rare-earth ones in electrical and electronic goods merely thrown into domestic refuse rather than collected separately. The EU's "Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment" Directive and its national-law translations go a long way to reducing that loss; with for example Councils in the UK having various ways to collect such scrap, as well as metals generally, glass, plastics, paper and cardboard.
Many shops also now have battery-recovery arrangements - just a suitable container in which to drop small cells of any type. There is a very serious aspect to this, especially with the enormous rise in popularity of nicotine-vapour cigarettes. These, especially the so-called "disposable" forms, contain small lithium-ion batteries, safe when intact but already responsible for fires in homes and in refuse-collection vehicles.
I believe France is banning disposable "vapes" and it is being considered here in the UK, but we tend to be very slow to implement regulations even when generally supported and agreed.
.
Trees can certainly be grown as crops, provided they are so with ecological and aesthetic care.
Animals can be farmed sustainably too, in areas suitable for this. Already many British farmers are turning to better systems including something rather pretentiously called "regenerative" - simply returning to careful rotations of crops, fallow and animals. They've also found some plants edible to the creatures can be used as feed supplements to reduce the methane supposedly emitted in vast amounts. (Vast I wonder at, but all anaerobic fermentation of vegetable matter produces some methane, including by digestion by [i]any[/i] animal - we are animals too!) Their manure can be processed to a fertiliser while collecting the methane for a fuel. That does burn to water and carbon-dioxide but at least cyclically, since its source was the pasture grass.
.
I learnt of an unusual late-19C "recycling" industry recently. The scrap-metal industry and ship-breaking yards selling the recovered timber were already long-established by then; but here, a company in the Eastern English town of Thetford had found another line. It collected worn-out jute sacks, and pulped them. The jute pulp was moulded, baked and finished into low-cost, unbreakable household goods like trays and jugs, sold as "Thetford Ware". I suppose the modern equivalent is the moulded cardboard egg-boxes and other special packagings; but an industry whose time may come again?
SatyrService · M
@ArishMell Thank you so much, what an awesome overview of a subject that I am passionate about. And such practical knowledge as well. You mentioned the thermostat plastics well in my experiments I’ve been melting the thermal plastics, and then grinding the thermostat plastic into various forms shreds dust etc. and combining the two together into molded products. Like you I have worked with the plastic lumber. And it does have drawbacks. But it doesn’t rot! And since I live in Oregon a place with the climate not so dissimilar to the British Isles,Not rotting is a key valuea key value. The thermal depolymerization technologies that can be used to mind the landfills, I’m pretty effective. The corporation that currently controls the best model is chosen not to use it. When you operate the system the first fraction that comes out is a natural gas product which can be used to drive the entire process. And yes my first project with my attempted combination of plastics? Imagine Lego bricks the size of Reall bricks
ArishMell · 70-79, M
@SatyrService Your experiments sound very interesting!
Recently I went for a walk through an area of countryside being restored to fen-land. In places the reserve managers had installed board-walks and built two bridges over a small river, and the planks on these were all of that re-used plastic.
One set had very rough surfaces but another was a bit smooth and might be slippery when wet.
About 30 or 40 years ago I read of some experiments being carried out by a major agricultural college in Britain, in growing coppice wood that could be harvested for distilling to produce gas (carbon-monoxide mainly) to fuel modified internal-combustion engines for driving generators etc. in remote areas. The paper was mainly about the tree species, as the engineering side is all established anyway, with fast-growing wood like willow and alder. The other main by-product would be charcoal that could be used for heating the retort or used in a secondary "producer-gas" plant. I don't know how far this ever progressed, though.
Recently I went for a walk through an area of countryside being restored to fen-land. In places the reserve managers had installed board-walks and built two bridges over a small river, and the planks on these were all of that re-used plastic.
One set had very rough surfaces but another was a bit smooth and might be slippery when wet.
About 30 or 40 years ago I read of some experiments being carried out by a major agricultural college in Britain, in growing coppice wood that could be harvested for distilling to produce gas (carbon-monoxide mainly) to fuel modified internal-combustion engines for driving generators etc. in remote areas. The paper was mainly about the tree species, as the engineering side is all established anyway, with fast-growing wood like willow and alder. The other main by-product would be charcoal that could be used for heating the retort or used in a secondary "producer-gas" plant. I don't know how far this ever progressed, though.
SatyrService · M
@ArishMell I’ve been following closely developments where a chemical reactor using cerium @ 1500 Fahrenheit actually removes carbon from the atmosphere and uses it to create syngas, a feedstock that can produce methanol ethanol gasoline and diesel. Using a natural heat source instead of power, for example a solar mirror array. Produces the product the sin gases then further processed to the desired fuel. There is a test plant in Spain 50 kW though it is still an experiment. And others are reaching out to heliostats, in the United States as that technology has been surpassed in efficiency by better solar cells. It is my hope to use a heliostat here, to provide the heat necessary, for the serum reactor.
Shaveit · 61-69, M
@SatyrService Every bit of that was publicity stunts. She didn’t travel anywhere she was sent.
SatyrService · M
@Shaveit Your opinion is noted
Shaveit · 61-69, M
