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Turning Garbage into Gold
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Aug 18, 2006 06:43 PM
from the by-your-powers-combined dept.
from the by-your-powers-combined dept.
bart_scriv writes "Entrepreneurs are creating companies that exploit the creative opportunities in other people's junk, sparing the environment in the process. The article looks at green entrepreneurship in general and profiles some specific companies, whose products range from recycled printer cartridges to rubber sidewalks. It also includes a slideshow on the process of making rubber sidewalks. From the article: 'While innovation has always been the entrepreneur's trademark, a growing interest in the green movement is propelling small business owners to create new products and services that also happen to be inventive recycling solutions for the country's vast waste heaps. 'The sustainability and restoring of our environment are providing opportunities in many fields of small business,' says John Stayton, co-founder and director of the Green MBA program at San Francisco's New College of California.'"
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wow-wee (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:trash to treasure (Score:3, Interesting)
Be a pal, bless my server. [i-bless.com]
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Re:trash to treasure (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:wow-wee (Score:4, Interesting)
I posted about rubber sidewalks in another forum... here's better links:
Christian Science Monitor story [csmonitor.com]
Rubber Sidewalk company page [rubbersidewalks.com]
Economical? Not yet, and not far away from California. Maybe if you're a streets & sanitation manager for a rich town and have money to blow in exchange for lower maintenance cost down the road. But that's why I appreciate small businesses in America and worldwide; they can be effective in their own niche and take risks that bigger companies wouldn't make.
Parent
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Why do citizens suffer when you cut taxes and cut services? They can then use their money to buy said services, and do it a lot better than some random guy in an office.
If you want your money invested in something worthwhile, invest it. Why would you want it to be taken from you and invested in whatever organization has the be
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Perhaps the government can meet more needs per dollar because it has more money to spread around (so much that economies of scale start to kick in)?
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Government inefficiency and corruption will take away any advantage of it buying in bulk, not to mention your freedom in choosing what you want and where you want to get it from.
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Do you really and honestly believe that you'll get the best possible deal from a large company?
I don't.
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Check the cost. Labor ain't cheap. (Score:3, Insightful)
The trick to recycling is to do so in an economic manner.
Re:Check the cost. Labor ain't cheap. (Score:4, Informative)
And don't get me started on the fact that plastics only last 1000 years in a dump if you bury it like an idiot. Plastics are photosensitive and will decay rapidly if just left where they can get sunlight.
Parent
Re:Check the cost. Labor ain't cheap. (Score:4, Interesting)
The paper issue is interesting though because you might consider discarded paper as a carbon sink.
As for not burying plastic... What do you suggest we do with it? Fill desert areas with trash? What kind of chemicals does decaying plastic leave behind?
-matthew
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Really? I'm pretty sure the electricity I use comes from hydropower. But maybe those big ol' dams are just for show.
-matthew
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Re:Check the cost. Labor ain't cheap. (Score:4, Informative)
Not true. From our experience (in Brazil), this monoculture aproach using non-native species leads to as much wildlife wipeout and soil/underground water spoiling as the damned "Queimadas", wich is the practice of burning the forest to give way to soybean crops and/or bovine pasture.
Parent
Re:Check the cost. Labor ain't cheap. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with your logic is that the tree you just "planted" by throwing out paper (wtf?), is not going to provide: shade or habitat or prevent erosion or breathe in a comparable amount of carbon dioxide. There are lots of other externalities you've neglected to account for, such as the chemical treatment it takes to produce paper pulp from wood (more so than recycled pulp). Nobody counts that because it gets dumped into the air, oceans and rivers.
According to some reports, many of North America's largest catalogs and tissue product manufacturers use virgin boreal pulp [nrdc.org].
Often in managed forests, where, as you triumphantly declare: trees are "specifically grown to supply paper", the trees that have been planted are not indigenous to the region. This endangers native plant and animal species, such as in Chile [panda.org].
Parent
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and what about the chemical treatment to recycle paper?
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You can read more here: a report from NH Dept of Environmental Services [state.nh.us].
I have taken the liberty of copying a few salient points:
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I call bullshit. Biodegradable plastics that decay with exposure to sunlight exist but have proven too expensive to manufacture for general use. Biodegradable plastics also tend to release carbon into the atmosphere. The plastics we use do not "decay rapidly" if just left in sunlight. Even if the coke
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Unfortunately, recycling plastics has proven difficult. The biggest problem with plastics recycling is that it is difficult to automate the sorting of plastic waste, and so it is labor intensive. Typically, workers sort the plastic by looking at the resin identification code, though common containers like soda bottles can be sorted from memory. Other recyclable materials, such as metals, are easier to process mechanically.
While containers are usually made from a single
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So, that's what Dell's been experimenting with!
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Score:2)
Sorry, but even in sunlight, they don't decay fast enough.
There is a giant ( twice the size of Texas ) pile of floating plastic in the north eastern Pacific know as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. An unfourtunate combination of wind and currents causes most anything dropped into the northern Paci
how is this recycling, anyway? (Score:2)
Ooookay. That's nice. But...er...what happens when the bag wears out? Or the paver gets too many cuts and dings from inline skates and people falling off bikes? You've got your trash back again, that's wha
Re:how is this recycling, anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonsense. Aluminum is aluminum is aluminum. Steel is steel. Silicon dioxide (glass) is silicon dioxide. You melt them down, blow off the impurities, and you are exactly back where you started -- and I mean right down to the molecule. The idea that somehow the Fe atoms that are part of your 2006 Ford car door might be "degraded" because they were once part of the trunk of a '56 Ford, and before that formed the bearing on a pushrod in a locomotive built in 1908, is inconsistent with basic principles of chemistry. (Biological recycling is even more efficient -- your food doesn't taste faintly of shit if the farmer manures the field.)
The only place you could make this kind of general argument is for composite polymer materials -- e.g. plastics, rubber and paper -- where it's not economical to reduce the materials to their original chemical form. Practically speaking, you can't reduce polystyrene waste to the olefins from which it was originally polymerized, in order to purge it of impurities, restore the original degree of polymerization, and restore the original composite mix of resin, plasticizers, et cetera. It just costs too much, as someone else has pointed out. So these materials are not, at present, significantly recycleable in any meaningful sense.
Instead, as in TFA, one "recycles" materials like these only in the toy sense of taking the used material and shaping it into another form for a while. It's as if you took your old, rusted-out car body, and, rather than melt the steel down and recast it into a pristine rust-free new car body, just turned the rustbucket into a planter, or some funky rust art. Or like my grandfather re-using wood from packing crates to stake up his tomato plants. Or GIs in the Second World War wiping their asses with pages from Stars and Stripes.
I don't think this is true recycling. It hasn't a prayer of ever becoming a closed loop, where the material recycles more or less endlessly, and you just supply energy. Turning your rusted-out automobile into a planter doesn't solve the fundamental problem at all, because the planter's just going to go into the dump itself, soon enough. You haven't done squat to figure out a way to truly close the loop, to turn the worn-out product back into a brand new product of the same type and quality.
Such "recycling" is a gimmick, an abuse of language, which conveys the false impression that something much more useful is going on than really is. The fact that some miniscule fraction of bicycle tires could be re-used by consumers one more time, for a year or so, as part of a rubber bookbag, can have no serious impact on the problem of our waste stream. It's re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Does it matter? Sure. Effort spent re-arranging deck chairs could be better spent trying to plug holes below the waterline. When people hear about all this "recycling" they may figure, hey, plenty's being done, and pay less attention to efforts at genuine recycling. (For example, although steel is infinitely recycleable, and very economically, only about 60% of American steel cans are recycled. That's idiotic.) Toy solutions can easily delay and prevent real solutions.
In any case, the more interesting thing is that entrepreneurs are beginning to see the profit potential of recycling garbage.
Good grief. Are we to suppose engineers have been idiots until early in the 21st century? Any fool understands that if you can figure out a way to turn "garbage" (what you can buy cheap) into "product" (what you can sell dear), then profit follows as night follows day. Consequently, the history of technology is chock-o'-block full of engineers taking "waste" products and finding new, useful things to do with them. This isn't a new insight or development, it's as old as compost heaps.
One historical example, relevant here, is that our entire modern plastics industry is based around the
Parent
eWaste is ready to kill us, so it's better to mine (Score:3, Interesting)
eWastecanada.ca [ewastecanada.ca] is a local business mining for gold.
Re:eWaste is ready to kill us, so it's better to m (Score:2)
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Re:eWaste is ready to kill us, so it's better to m (Score:4, Insightful)
I find that very difficult do believe. I mean that's 5-25 POUNDS of solder. What the hell are they doing in there?
The heaviest thing in a television set is the picture tube. Since it's big and filled with vacuum it must have very thick walls. Thick glass walls. I suppose they could be lead crystal glass tubes, but that would be needlessly expensive, and wouldn't leach into the water supply in any meaningful timescale anyway. The next heaviest thing is the hundreds of wrappings of thin copper wire. There is no reason to ever make thin copper wire out of lead. In fact, it's impossible.
That figure smacks of taking advantage of people's ignorance about a heavy rarely opened box in almost everyone's homes. There's gotta be some kind of term for abusing people's uncertainty about things to encourage fear to promote some kind of crazy agenda.
Parent
Re:eWaste is ready to kill us, so it's better to m (Score:4, Informative)
Bingo [wikipedia.org]. It's heavily leaded glass to absorb X-rays generated by the electron beams smashing into the aperture grille etc.
Parent
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If everyone is not using LCD monitors by now they should be shunned and tsked at by the general population for being energy-wasters.
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Breaking news: Profitability is good! (Score:4, Insightful)
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At your expense; and, generally speaking, that of the environment as well.
KFG
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As our resources become less and less in the next few decades this sort of business will become much more important. These are the precursors to what very well could be a huge industry boom in the near future.
Also, you don't find the fact that their business relies on the refuse of other businesses instead of using new resources to be interesting? Wow. How jaded you have become!
Creative opportunities in other people's junk (Score:2, Funny)
Old saying (Score:2)
I work with a nonprofit doing some of this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Only a slight tangent (Score:2)
i had a 3000+ sq ft warehouse full at one point but too many problems
Other wholesalers/retailers were only interested in the particular product number they normally used even if something was equal or simply a different package quantity.
Soon even the charities didnt want odd quantities or small lots, they wanted pallets of gloves and money. By that point all our excess had to be put in garbage.
Between storing it, sorting it and paying t
Recycled rubber sidewalks? Bad idea. (Score:3, Informative)
Back in the '80s... (Score:3, Interesting)
Eventually the installed base of systems dried up. That's when my second career started...
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That's really just two ways of saying the same thing. And in any case, isn't delaying the inevitable a worthwhile thing to do? The more slowly the landfills fill, the more time we have to come up with a way to solve the problem.
When that happens, we will have the same volume of trash as we started with.
No matter what happens (barring space exploration, and meteorites, anyway), we will always have the same volu