Giant Microwave Turns Plastic Back to Oil 555
An anonymous reader writes "From the newscientist article: "Key to GRC's process is a machine that uses 1200 different frequencies within the microwave range, which act on specific hydrocarbon materials. As the material is zapped at the appropriate wavelength, part of the hydrocarbons that make up the plastic and rubber in the material are broken down into diesel oil and combustible gas.""
People... (Score:3, Interesting)
Will this be the new trendy form of cremation?
Question about the process... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I've been saying for years (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Or it's a dead end that has no commercial value and will probably only be used in research.
That'd be my guess; the oil used to make plastic isn't that expensive... yet.
liquify other hydrocarbons? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I've been saying for years (Score:3, Interesting)
We have separate containers (and pick-up services) for normal trash, green trash (anything bio-degradable), chemical trash (paint, batteries and stuff) and paper.
Instead of 1 large trashcan, we have 4 smaller ones.
Re:Need an enforcement structure, though. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Question about the process... (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, while the light show may look menacing, it doesn't hurt the magnetron UNLESS the fork is touching one of the walls and hence has a path to the magnetron. So sticking a wire on a tray in the middle is ok.
Please use base 10, not base 0.454 (Score:5, Interesting)
These numbers are attributed to Jerry Meddick, director of business development at Global Resource Corporation. I'd guess mr. Meddick originally said to the reporter "running 20 pounds of ground-up tyres ... produces 1.2 gallons of diesel oil, 50 cubic feet of combustible gas, 2.2 lb of steel, and 7.5 lb of carbon black", using units he's familiar with.
Okay, a publication calling itself scientific is not going to publish figures in non-SI units. I appreciate the effort of conversion, but it's not much better to publish figures in "base 0.454", as it were. Reading in base 10, the above quote best represents (in a roundabout way) the steel yield of the machine: to get 1 kg of steel, put in 9.1 kg of ground-up tyres.
What if you want to express the total yield per unit of ground-up tyres? Use a unit amount or a power of 10 amount of tyres and calculate the rest from that:
For every 10 kilograms of ground-up tyres, the Hawk-10 produces 5 litres of diesel oil, 1.6 cubic metres of combustible gas, 1.1 kg of steel, and 3.7 kg of carbon black.
This is much easier to comprehend: if a ton (1000 kg) of ground-up tyres were delivered to a Hawk-10, it would produce approximately 500 litres of diesel oil, enough to run my 1999 Ford Focus on my 100 km per day commute 5 days a week for 20 weeks.
Now, where's that microwawe...?
Re:this is great (Score:1, Interesting)
Spelling doesn't have to reflect the pronunciation (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the great and wonderful things about English is that spelling reflects quite accurately the history of the word. Sure, there are some pronunciation ambiguities that are a little difficult to learn, but even ESL learners get over that hill remarkably quickly.
But with English -- unlike almost any other language -- you can look at a word and immediately know that its roots are in Greek, or Latin, or French, or Celtic, or whether it's a modern loan word. This has massive benefits for advanced literacy, as it means you actually know more words than you think you do, and can quite accurately guess at the meaning of new words you encounter -- which is of far greater utility than simply knowing how to say the word. Get the sound wrong and people will correct you almost immediately, so what's the problem?
In other languages, once a word has been imported, its roots are lost, and with that the connection to the linguistic system from which it came, and its connection to other similarly-sourced words.
So, regular spelling: great for primary school kids; not so great for everyone else who wants to use language at a more advanced level, for things like communication and literature.
Its the shopping system that sucks (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not? Why cannot items be prices per volume, not per packet.
Or if super markets provided recycling bins so you can bring back old containers/wrapping and pay the consumer back with a store credit that will
reduce garbage dumps massively. Id like to see a 30cent discount on a shampoo bottle if I bring back the old one. At least this 'discount' system bypasses
taxes so you dont get taxed on the recycling (* until some idiot politician acts like a mafia boss and goes, lets rape and steal *)
Re:Microwaves do chemistry, what about cell phones (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I've been saying for years (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Need an enforcement structure, though. (Score:3, Interesting)
The perfect job for prisoners... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hooray! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I've been saying for years (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I've been saying for years (Score:5, Interesting)
That sounds to me like a recipe for high inflation. After all, the only thing that causes inflation, is inflation: things get more expensive so people demand a pay rise, and then having to pay workers more makes things get more expensive.
Actually not. Money, is a commodity.
It acts just like any other commodity. If there's too much coffee, the value decreases. Money works in exactly the same way. Inflation can only occur if there's too much money in the economy, the value of the individual dollar/pound/euro decreases and everything else appears to increase in cost. All that's happening is that the currency is devaluing, which you then see on the currency markets as well.
The dirty little (non) secret of our current monetary system is two fold. First, "the national debt" and second "fractional reserve banking".
The first point is that the government and central bankers create money from nothing and create a national IOU to balance it. The government borrows money from the bankers and they write down this debt and demand interest on it. The money has been borrowed into existence. This money is then paid to government employees, contractors, suppliers etc where it enters the economy.
The second stage of this is the fractional reserve banking system. This is perhaps the biggest scam ever created. The fractional reserve banking system allows commercial banks to loan out to people more money than they have in reserve. Hence "fractional reserve" Typically they can loan out up to 20 times more than they have in deposits. That is they only have to have on hand about 5% on average of what they are allowed to loan out.
So this money comes from the government national debt, into the economy, lands in the banks deposit accounts and is then multiplied about 19 times as loans. 95% + 95% of that 95% and so on till it reaches 0. It's a recipe for creating both massive debt and massive inflation.
Which the central banks and government attempt to control using the base interest rates. Essentially what it does is divide society into the creditors and the debtors. Every dollar that someone owns is one dollar's worth of debt, owed by someone else. There are other implications also with constantly and repeatedly paying 5% interest on money.
1. The bankers will ultimately be the sole and inevitable owners of everything. They set the rules of the game years ago.
2. Everyone has to work an extra 5% harder each year for their cash, because they have to try to pay this debt. This has implications for everyone and everything. All businesses, taxpayers must constantly expand their efforts by that 5% every year to service this interest. Think about it. This is an exponential increase. 100%, 105%, 110¼%, 115¾%, 121½% and we have to try to keep up. It explains why capitalism has become so rapacious. The debts have to be serviced and to even pretend to do so requires an exponential increase in the economy.
3. The debt can never actually be paid. There isn't enough money in existence to pay of the debt, ever. Because of the interest on the initial creation of the money. You borrow $100 into existence but owe $105 at the end of the year, the extra $5 doesn't actually exist, it was never created, so you borrow some more. And so we divide into the people who have managed to pay the debt and people who are saddled with mounting levels which are literally impossible to pay.
It didn't used to be this way. A trade used to mean that two people exchanged something of value. A chicken for a duck. Both of them benefitted. Even when money came along, it still meant that both parties benefitted, they were exchanging items they valued more, a chicken for a dollar, it wasn't required for someone somewhere to lose out. That all changed during the last century. Our money became debt based. Every dollar/pound/euro/yen/yuan required a debt, paying interest to the bankers, interest on money they created from nothing.
It can actually be narr
Re:Hooray! (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with current plastic recycling is that you reduce the length of the polymer molecules each time you recycle, reducing the quality of the plastic. So you can't turn PET bottles into PET bottles indefinitely; you have to turn them into lower-quality plastic items such as plastic speed bumps. After a couple of cycles, the plastic ends up in a landfill.
And that only applies to thermoplastics (which can be melted). Thermosets, which cannot be melted, are much more difficult to recycle, and are "downcycled" much farther in quality.
The beauty of the "giant microwave" process is that it turns plastic recycling into a truly cyclic process, instead of a delayed linear process. If you transform plastic back into its raw material, you can recycle it into plastic of equal or greater quality (upcycling). You keep it out of the landfill for much longer (not accounting for people who don't bother to recycle).
Re:Need an enforcement structure, though. (Score:3, Interesting)
The police do give fines for not properly separating waste in the bins, but there are huge differences between municipalities in how often they check waste bins. It depends on whether they have better things to do really. The police also gives fines for putting household waste in public bins.
Recently there was a lot of attention for an appeal case of a woman who was fined for putting a plastic bread bag in a public bin after feeding ducks with stale bread. She did take the bag from home, but the case does make one wonder what you ARE allowed to put in public waste bins. There is no foolproof enforceable way to prohibit throwing household waste in public bins. What definitely IS legal is throwing excessive packaging material directly into a public bin when you walk out of a shop. It is obviously better to leave it in the shop, as you are allowed to refuse excessive packaging, but most shops don't properly accommodate this and get away with that because most people are simply too polite to just throw it on the floor. What does work for shops is the principle that you collect what you sell. If you sell appliances, batteries, bottles, etc. you also collect them.
Same with the fines for not properly separating waste. There are people who at night secretly throw waste - often the wrong kind - in other people's bins. This is an offense as it involves trespassing, but the police do nothing about it. Social control works to some extent as these people ARE considered antisocials because of this. The solution implemented in some towns is underground public containers with swipe cards and pin codes that weigh how much you throw in.
And if this were weaponized? (Score:1, Interesting)
Been around for years - sort of (Score:1, Interesting)
They wouldn't do the rework during the day since it created tons of black smoke coming out of the smokestack.
Re:I've been saying for years (Score:3, Interesting)
Huh? The debt is no different than my personal debt. I have some income. I have some expenses. I have some debt. I pay more on my debt than the interest, and the debt goes down. Eventually, it becomes zero. I pay less than my interest, and my debt goes up. Eventually the bankers will own the world. It is quite possible to pay debt down. Clinton balanced the budget (yes, I imagine you are one of the people that will disagree with that, but I'll say it that way anyway). If the trend had continued, rather than sharply reversing under a Republican replacement, our debt would be decreasing and on its way to being paid off.
You know paper economics, the kind a person who got a degree in something else (or never got a degree) thinks could make sense. However, you don't know economics the way it works. Economics is psychology, not math. You know the math, but seriously missed the psychology. Why is inflation the way it works? Because deflation would kill millions of Americans. If I hold onto my money and it is worth less tomorrow, then I either spend it or invest it. There is a disincentive to holding onto cash. With deflation, my money will be worth more tomorrow if I don't spend it and may be worth more tomorrow than many investments. I should not invest it without really really good cause, and I shouldn't spend it unless absolutely necessary. But what does that do? Well, everyone starts hoarding money. Investments slow. Progress stops. The economy crashes and millions are homeless and the government is broke and unable to ensure basic support. The USA becomes a 3rd world country, like the Great Depression, only worse. This is so feared by politicians and real economists, that what you imply is a fraud by them to steal from us was put in place to save us. Without built-in inflation, there would be fluctuations of inflation/deflation. Both are unstable. Deflation has been deemed worse than inflation. Deflation is harder to manage than inflation. So a "small" inflation has been built-in to our economy to ensure stability of the economy. People much smarter than you determined that this is an acceptable trade off.
P.S. Anyone that says that we should be on the gold standard obviously doesn't understand economics. All it does is drive up the cost of gold by artificially creating scarcity with governments hoarding it, and even when we were on the gold standard, it wasn't fixed. That is, $1 wouldn't buy you the same amount of gold in 1870 and 1970, so inflation existed when we were on the gold standard. Oh, and gold isn't an investment. It's more like a currency exchange. Gold historically performs close to inflation, losing out to "real" investments, like land, stocks, even crappy bonds by the government...
Re:I've been saying for years (Score:4, Interesting)
So will hyperinflation caused by currency de-valuation, due to oversupply and no demand, which is a scenario we're facing now.
Huh? The debt is no different than my personal debt. I have some income. I have some expenses. I have some debt. I pay more on my debt than the interest, and the debt goes down. Eventually, it becomes zero
As individuals we can theoretically pay down our own debt faster than it accumulates by reigning in our spending, or working harder or whatever. But this can't happen on the macro-scale, if I start paying my debt faster, it just means someone else is falling behind faster (indirectly because they are paying me more, or suffering from me not buying as much).
There simply isn't enough money in the system to pay everyone's debt down. Unless we print more, and then lend it to people... which is exactly what we do. Except that borrowing more money to pay down the debt doesn't really get us anywhere.
Its equivalent to paying your Mastercard with your Visa.
Intuitively eventually this catches up to you, and it looks like this is finally starting to happen. They thought as long as the population grows, and technology advanced, that the total productivity of the nation would keep up with the currency debt spiral, and the 'balance' could be held indefinately.
Deflation has been deemed worse than inflation. Deflation is harder to manage than inflation. So a "small" inflation has been built-in to our economy to ensure stability of the economy. People much smarter than you determined that this is an acceptable trade off.
They knew it was unstable, but they thought they could control it. I can't say for certain that it absolutely can't be controlled, but its becoming clear that they, at the very least, lacked the discipline or ability to control it.
Inflation is rising, despite their best efforts to keep it low, and they're lying about it. They are changing the rules, and redefining things to hide the true inflation rate. The use of hedonics for example.
If you bought a computer 3 years ago for $1000, and then replace it with one that today also costs $1000, but is twice as fast. They count it as a $2000 dollar computer (because its 'twice as good' as the old one) and inflation shows that the price of computers today is half what it was 3 years ago, despite the fact that we're still paying the same amount.
Of course, when the price actually goes up, they substitute an inferior product to keep inflation numbers looking low. Suppose you bought a desk for $200 dollars several years ago and it was made of, oh say, actual wood. And then you try to buy that same furniture today, you'd find might it would cost $1000 perhaps, you know, due to the inflation of the price of wood... but you can get a piece-o-crap desk at walmart made of plastic and particle board for $200 bucks -- well then we'll just substitute for that and inflation shows a 0% change. Desks are still $200 hurrah!
And when something is really ugly, like the recent fuel price hikes... well how are we going to fix for that? Its not like we can substitute a cheaper product in? How about we just not count fuel anymore? Ok! So, now inflation is reported excluding energy. (And food is excluded to for that matter.)
So lets see... inflation is supposed to be a broad measure that tells us essentially how much more money we need this year over last year in order to maintain the same standard of living? Yet it excludes the cost of fuel and energy. It requires that I buy inferior products. And even though my cellphone costs the same as the last two I've bought I'm supposed to think I've massively splurged on it because it now has a camera, and picture caller id.
So what exactly does 'inflation' mean NOW? Its just a meaningless number so detached from reality that its useless, except that people still find it pschologically reassuring to hear that inflation is