A Paper Alloy To Replace Plastic Cases 182
xwwt writes "In response to a paper by Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics, PEGA Design & Engineering has developed a new product that is intended to replace plastic shell material in computer equipment and electronics. The product contains a combination of paper and polypropylene (PP) which aids in recycling efforts and is intended to keep non-recyclable materials out of landfills. The PP should break down in sunlight and can be reclaimed. There is concern that polypropylene cannot be separated from the paper fiber and brings into question how the material will be recycled. As poster Paul Davis points out, it might have been better to use polylactic acid. Ultimately, it raises the question: is this truly a recyclable material?"
sounds like.. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not a chemist, but this sounds like one of those substances that'll degrade before it should, causing premature failure. plastic has gotten cheap and unreliable enough these days that I wonder if any increased recyclability is being offset by more products being thrown away due to premature breakage. perhaps it's anecdotal, but around the early 1990s, I noticed plastics getting lighter and more brittle, and larger products made with them had structural problems compared with their predecessors. examples coming to mind include kids toys, household appliances, automotive components, and personal electronics.
Re:"Trully recyclable" ? (Score:5, Informative)
What does that even mean?
"Trully recyclable" is a typo, what they mean is that some materials can be reused, infinitely and economically for the same purpose. Examples would be copper or aluminum. Many materials are not recyclable, but they are downcyclable which means that every time you reclaim them the end product is a raw material for a lower grade product. Water Bottles for example get downcycled into lower grade packaging which in turn gets downcycled into garden furniture which gets downcycled into concrete supplements. Plastic is probably one of the most serious and damaging pollutants in the modern world. The oceans are full of it and it clogs up beaches around the world in enormous quantities. Finding a substitute that is either biodegradable or truly recyclable would be very important. But then of course you already knew that, you just couldn't resist letting out your inner spelling nazi. Nevertheless, thank you for this opportunity, it's been fun treating you like an idiot.
Re:Won't degrade well in the landfill? (Score:5, Informative)
Methane is generated by anaerobic processes. You wouldn't pump air in to generate methane; you'd just collect it as it built up as bacteria turned solid and liquid waste into the gas.
Re:"Trully recyclable" ? (Score:5, Informative)
Plastic is truly recyclable. It is just a lot cheaper to pump new oil out of the ground than to properly separate out the hydrocarbons. See also monomer recycling [wikipedia.org]
Re:Umm, solving the wrong problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. Being in the recycling business I can give you some additional comments.
Currently computer cases are made of ABS or PC/ABS (a blend of PC and ABS). Usually light grey or beige colour, occasionally black, and sometimes laden with flame retardants. Under the European RoHS this has to be a bromine-free FR for new products, but of course in the recycling you get lots of pre-RoHS materials as well. The main problem here is that the recycled material has limited applications, it can not be used for products to be sold within Europe for example.
Computer cases are being recycled big time, this is quite valuable material in the recycling world. The computer recyclers will collect and bale those cases for sale to plastic recyclers, China is a major market for this material. Here the material is sorted by type, washed, and repelletised for use in new products.
Regarding colouring: you can not remove pigments from a plastic, if it's in, it's in forever. Same accounts for other additives and fillers. You can only dye the plastic to a darker colour; in practice most coloured plastic is dyed black when it's reprocessed. This as the end user will always want a very specific colour (there are thousands of shades of red, for example), all colours can be dyed to black, and black is one of the most commonly used colours.
The PCBs is another matter: they contain many precious metals such as gold, and are also recycled. Working ICs are often reused (no idea what for but I know they're doing it), the precious metals are recovered. The latter in particular is a very nasty process, as it requires all kinds of poisonous chemicals. And it's often causing a lot of pollution, because these chemicals are often allowed to leak in the soil.
Back to the proposed material. It may or may not be recycled, I don't know. New technologies may have to be developed. It sounds a bit similar to the more common wood-plastic-composite, which is a blend of wood flour with plastics such as HDPE, PP or PVC. This is often used as replacement for wood.
PP does degrade in sunlight: I live in a subtropical area, near the tropic, so especially in summer we have very strong sunlight. Leave a PP product out in the sun and in a year it's become brittle and loses all strength. But it must be exposed to sunlight (specifically the UV part of course), as otherwise nothing happens. So any material covered by other material is well protected. And the flip side is also that the PP is really degraded, and has become useless. No recycling can regain any strength in the material, it's lost and has become total waste. Degenerating until something that can not be seen anymore takes a lot longer, and again requires exposure to direct sunlight.
RE: planned obsolescense (Score:5, Informative)
And some things are built far better than they were in ye olden days - cars being the best example. Show me a car from the 50s, 60s, or 70s that could go 100,000 miles with just oil changes and brake pads. Show me a 5 year, 50,000 mile warranty from back then.
Perhaps cars aren't the best example. At least in the US, for a time cars were used to be specifically designed for planned obsolescense. For example, the Ford model T [wikicars.org] was a highly reliable rugged car that used advanced technology and materials and manufacturing techniques of the era to achieve that reliability. Unfortunatly the US car makers eventually decided that a consumption business model would be more profitable than a manufacturing based business model. US car makers then designed cars to wear out and seeded extensive dealer and parts distribution networks to capitalize on this business model.
When the Japanese decided they wanted to enter the US market in the '60s they didn't have all the parts distributors and repair resources that the incumbant US manufacturers had, they also had tax and distribution expenses to deliver products to the US, so they had to design their cars to last longer and be more reliable to justify higher initial product prices and repair prices to penetrate the market. The consumers eventually caught on to the value proposition for this business model and this led to the Japanese car manufacturers caputuring a larger part of the market in the '70s and '80s (the oil prices spiking during that time favoring the smaller Japanese cars didn't hurt either). After suffering major market declines, the US manufacturers essentially had to up their quality game to remain competitive which is why you see all the high quality cars from all manufacturers today.
It wasn't because the car manufacturers couldn't do the high reliability before (they started out that way), it's because they thought the planned obsolescence business model allowed them to make more money (sell, it cheaper, make spare parts, and encourage them to replace the product sooner). It's only after the Japanese car companies forced the US manufacturers away from that model that we get to where we are today.