The rise of miniature 'microfactories' | Hacker News Reader

The rise of miniature 'microfactories'

bbc.com

65 pointskafkaesq25 comments

Her last big idea, in 2005, was "green steel", using old tires as an input to steelmaking. In practice, the one company using this replaces about 12% - 16% of their coke with old tires. [1] This doesn't replace coke in making pig iron, the first phase of steelmaking from ore and the big user of coke and thus coal. It's just for a fraction of the small amount of coke used in electric arc furnace steel recycling to assist in getting the non-steel "slag" out of the metal. It's more a useful way to get rid of tires than a way to make steel "green".

So there's a history of over-promotion here.

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/business/carbon-economy/waste-revoluti... [2] http://www.worldsteel.org/steel-by-topic/sustainable-steel/c...

In my observation, the thing that big idea decentralist utopias always forget around manufacturing is supply-chain. Who wants to buy this stuff? Mostly other factories. Where are they located? Mostly in China. Why? Because they're in the same position. The only exceptions seem to be highly skilled design-heavy work where secrecy and control may be priorities (ie. military/space) and very low skilled manual labor pools (ie. many clothing factories) which are now migrating elsewhere (especially Vietnam) due to mainland Chinese wage increases.

You can decentralize 'til the cows come home but if there's no local demand for your product, you're wasting your time.

There is also the issue of prototyping; some classes of goods (eg some music parts, gun parts, car parts...) require large amounts of design & experimentation work, and have high enough price points with low enough volume that it's worthwhile to use the same machines you're prototyping on for "mass" production.

Even if the ultimate result is cloneable, volume probably doesn't justify a large factory in China going out of their way to duplicate it. If the design work benefits from tight feedback loops it can be worthwhile to produce locally.

But even there, the components are made from the same intermediates as high volume products. "You don't just take sand from the beach to produce a dataprobe", if I may quote a computer game.

The supplies question makes one off products just as dependent on proximity as high volume products. Or maybe even more so: if you set up high volume production, no matter the cost, you will be able to source your components at somewhat acceptable prices anywhere in the world. If you do the same with lower volumes, being close to the existing supply chains that developed around volume buyers makes all the difference in the world.

You'd be surprised what you can do with, eg, billet aluminum, which is available essentially everywhere and requires no elaborate supply chain to source cheaply. Something like a cell phone or a car has an incredibly elaborate bill of materials and isn't representative of the sorts of product where non-mass-production is even in question.

>""You don't just take sand from the beach to produce a dataprobe", if I may quote a computer game."

Alpha Centaur, great game that I spent countless hours on. I still remember quite a lot of the quotes after listening to those characters mentioning them so many times. If anyone wants some more of the quotes from that game:

http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/smac.html

> And while the amounts in each phone are small – 0.034g of gold, for example – they quickly add up when you consider that around 42 million tonnes of e-waste were generated in 2014 alone, and the UN Environmental Program estimates that figure is increasing by 3-5% each year.

What are the economics of this?

> In Sahajwalla’s vision of the microfactory, pre-programmed automated drones are used to pick out items such as circuit boards from a pile of smashed e-waste. These boards are then put into a tiny furnace which uses selective temperatures to extract the valuable resources, such as copper alloys. The glass and plastic can also be combined in this high-temperature smelter to produce silicon carbide nanoparticles, which have a range of industrial applications.

How?

I agree this vision (as stated) is fantasy, but I've often speculated about whether it would be smart to buy up land that was formerly used as landfill. It doesn't generally seem to be considered valuable.

I suppose this is because it is not desirable for property development or agriculture... the killer might be assuming some liability for environmentals but I never investigated that in detail.

An interesting option would be to try and buy just the mineral rights. The seller will probably think you're crazy, and they might be right.

In any case, a landfill operation is close to the reverse of mining, and while the extraction technology one would need isn't here yet, it's hard to think of how you could get greater concentrations of natural resources all in one place. Plus everything is at least close to the surface.

Another major downside I can see is that landfills tend to be too close to built-up areas. People want their trash to go "away", but also they don't want to take it too far. Which then leads to the surprising mental image of landfill "ore" being dug up and transported to a remote processing site.

[this is why I think the author's vision is mostly fiction -- it's hard for most people to imagine the sheer scale that modern resource extraction operations need to be profitable].

The slightly unfortunate part is the "crazy grandpa" image that leaving such a legacy to your descendants creates...

In other discussions about this, the point is made that there are some very nasty things buried in those landfills. (I'm certainly no authority) Hazerdous waste, bio-waste, etc.

The mining technology would have to include something to mitigate that. Not just as immediate safety, but what do you do with it once you've dug it up? Or through it?

Mining has always been hazardous, both in terms of the materials themselves and the industrial processes involved.

Likewise, most resource extraction creates significant waste problems, whether that is just mountains of tailings or giant pools of arsenic or whatever.

I don't really see any difference (modulo surprising technology of the future). For purposes of discussion, imagine that the waste processing plant is out in the desert, and the waste is run through multiple extraction passes, where it might get dug up and put back in the ground again several times.

Of course, a lot of ore just gets shipped offshore to where processing is cheaper so that could be an option too.

Forget the drones. Buy up a bunch of land next to a landfill. Buy an old excavator for $20k. Buy an industrial shredder for $30k. Buy large steel wheel. Spin wheel to separate particles by density. Recycle plastics. Melt metals. Sell. Be unprofitable. Lose money. Have fun.

Ok, writing this one down...

About your first question:hugely profitable

The near future makes me laugh since it resemble a bad parody of nature. We're almost primitive, can't wait.

I love how this article reminded me how I am apparently out of touch with reality and why I should never assume anything I do would be representative of the general public :)

> How many mobile phones have you owned in your lifetime? Given that we upgrade to a new smartphone on average every 11 months, it’s unlikely any of us could answer this question with any certainty.

Easy: Nokia, Siemens, Nokia, HTC, HTC, Nexus (current) - that's since 2001 with no gap

> The next question is likely to be even harder: what happened to all your old phones?

Also easy, they're all in a drawer, right here. Except the currently used one, of course.

Got my first phone in 1998 - Nokia 5110, since then: Siemens c35i, Nokia 7210, HTC Touch, Samsung Galaxy Note 2 which I use still today.

I never understoon the need to upgrade every year or even every two years, just to have the latest model. I upgrade only when the old one stops working or when new model offers some fundamental improvements like "colorful display" or "android operating system" :)

Hehe, same here. I assume there's a ton of pre smartphone cemetary-drawers in the world. Ah the joy of week long battery life, good old past.

Nokia (snake forever), Pantec Duo (what a shitty phone), Palm smartphone, LG Android, Motorola Android x2 (Dropped it which destroyed the screen. Liked it enough to buy another one which was cheaper than a screen replacement), Windows Lumia.

Since roughly 2003.

Drones, microfurnaces, sorting robots... Quite a bit of "stuff". Theoretically, the perfect recycling machine would break even on the raw materials used when it has processed the trash equivalent of itself. But that would be Diamond Age level technology, and even then ignoring all energy demands and plain old monetary investment.

In reality, even conventional mining tends to use a lot of "helper materials" that are consumed in the ore processing but do not end up being part of the product that is sold to the next step of the supply chain. Reducing the scale from industrial to laboratory only worsens the efficiency of that material use. Energy efficiency of micro vs macro is a lost case anyway, but for the sake of utopianism I'm willing to not dwell on that to much. "Miracle energy source" would be one of the less fantastic assumptions required to make these microfactories actually rise.

It sounds like the big component missing out of this plan is the sorting component; we don't yet have robots capable of looking at a big pile of arbitrary junk and picking out the useful bits, let alone ones capable of intelligently tearing down an iPhone. Once robotics does have that sort of capacity though, I'd bet this sort of recycling scheme would be more likely than other commenters suggest- replacing skilled human labor with robotics has a track record of making unexpected things economically viable.

How well does this[1] fit the bill (tearing down an iPhone)?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc

Fairly well, actually- thanks for pointing that out. I'd be curious to see if this actually gets rolled out in force!

I mentioned iPhones as a random example, of course, since while they probably represent a disproportionate amount of recycled-electronics' value they're still a small fraction of the whole. Ideally, a robot would be capable of figuring out how to break down an unfamiliar device autonomously, without the specialized movements and programming that seems to have gone into that particular example.

Problem is, it's optimized for tearing down iPhones and nothing much else.

I think this fits the bill better. Deep Learning + Robotics. Only problem is what is the energy costs going to be like?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaF43Ze1oeI

This sounds a lot like what they wanted to do with the great leap forward in China.

This appeared more wishful and idealistic than practical.

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