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from the saving-the-world-one-bottle-at-a-time dept.
Within just a few generations, plastic has already taken over the world, and while this material enabled a revolution in manufacturing and design, plastic has also managed to become one of the biggest menaces on the planet, thanks to its convenience and ease of production. And although commercial collection and recycling of plastics is getting better and more accessible, in many areas plastics end up in the dump instead the recycling facility, essentially burying this resource, which could be used to great effect if only the machinery were available to do so.
A few years ago, Kimberly wrote about the efforts of Dave Hakkens, who created a series of machines intended to put plastic recycling into the hands of the people. His Precious Plastics project promised free and open source blueprints, plans, and instructions for building these plastics recycling machines, which included a shredder, an extruding machine, an injection device, and a compression machine, and that information is now available on the website for anyone to download and put to work.
[...] The full set of Precious Plastic V2.0 information, which includes the CAD files and blueprints as well as posters, images, and instructions, is available as a free download under an open-source license, and detailed videos are available on the website to guide people through the process.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday November 04 2016, @05:13PM
Unfortunately, a great many of these byproducts are outright toxic, or bad for living organisms in other ways.
(Score: 1) by Tara Li on Thursday November 10 2016, @04:27PM
That's why they get kept, instead of dumped, and fed into the next process. Hell, oil and tar are "outright toxic, or bad for living organisms in other ways". We turn *those* into all kinds of useful products. Toxicity has little relationship with usefulness. Radioactive waste from nuclear power plants? Sounds like feedstock for radiothermal generators, to me.
The suitability of ore for the extraction of metals depends on concentration - so, from the waste brought in, keep extracting the things you can easily pull out until you get the waste metals down to the point where its worth just throwing them into the input stream with the newly mined ore. Sooner or later, you get to the point where you're not bothering to mine new ore, since you've got enough coming from the recycling to produce the final product you need. Slag glass from the refining? Mold into lego-shaped bricks, start assembling houses or other buildings out of them. Paint if you want some particular look. (Though "lego-shape" in particular might not be best - they're designed to have a lot of void to minimize mass used. Then again, that would make for more effective insulation, perhaps, though more mass is more thermal mass, which has its own energy efficiency once the mass is brought up [or down] to the desired temperature. Still, engineers should be able to come up with a standard brick that interlocks, provides the best structural strength, and works best for energy management purposes.)
George Washington Carver went looking for what to do with peanuts. He found hundreds of uses. We should never be looking at something and saying "Oh, that's completely useless, let's just throw it away." We should be saying "Ok, what can I use this for? Does someone else already use this themselves so I could sell it to them, even if I sell it cheaply since they might have to clean it up some?"
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday November 10 2016, @06:15PM
The problem is that a lot of the toxic stuff is just dumped into the environment because it's too "expensive" do deal with. I put expensive in quotes, as it's only expensive in the short-term financial aspect. People are short-sighted and greedy.