Landfills – a future source of raw materials
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lnu.se
Garbage mining, of course, is nothing new — there are tens of thousands of cartoneros both here in Argentina and in Brazil, the figure of the "rag and bone man" goes back generations, and automotive junkyards are nothing more than open-air landfills to "mine" for specialized parts. But improvements in robotics and AI will make economic the recovery of valuable materials from increasingly dilute waste streams, as well as those that are too hazardous for human mining.
Once we have von Neumann probes, it seems likely that we will do some asteroid mining. I don't know what effect that will have on the markets for raw materials, except that it will almost certainly make the platinum group cheaper.
If we're at a convention hosted by the first self-aware AI on an orbital platform I owe you a home fabrication device.
If society succeeds and creates a good society, you're down just one cheap home fabrication device but living in a society where you don't have to eat rats.
I don't know why people throw away their consumer electronics. I got an Original iPhone for $5 and sold it back to AT&T for $100 trade in credit (this was in 2012). I also used the phone on their 2G network for six months and connected to local WiFi.
What do you think AT&T did with the Original iPhone?
Here's an example of recovering gold from MLCC (a type of surface mount capacitor): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1UoIU6Ef-o
Alternative to incinerators; instead of combustion, break stuff down to bits using wind. Then just sort thru the resulting slurry, pulling out the good bits.
Edit: Aha. Windhexe circa 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windhexe I always wondered if heated air vortexes could be used to preprocess electronics for material recycling.
Incidinetally this is why I think Fusison/"Orders of magnitude better energy sources" (of which Fusion is the only viable one I'm aware of) are pretty much the most important thing for the overall continued stability of civilization.
Um yeah, but until we have fusion which isn’t anytime soon, you’re proposing that we keep transforming energy, with losses at each step. In reality, where we have to live, and our energy isn’t coming from hypothetical sources, reconstituting plastic and reversing metal oxidation makes no sense at all.
* we have a few hundred million years or so to find a new one before it becomes markedly less safe.
The difficulty us mere mortals have with sustained fusion is keeping the reaction from blowing itself apart (as in dissipation, not bomb). Gravity keeps things in check for free, but since gravity is so weak compared to atomic forces, you need an awful lot of it.
Our current containment solutions using electromagnetic forces require a lot of energy to maintain and so far, more than produced from the resulting fusion reaction.
- increasing automation in the recovery and processing steps
- increasing rarity of at least some valuable materials
- decreasing cost of renewable intermittent energy
Will make mining our landfills economically viable. Unless our society implodes earlier, which I hope it won't.
Silicon, aluminum, iron, and concrete excepted, naturally.
And, yeah, this uses energy. That's why I mentioned accessible energy as one of the two things we do actually consume.
My best guess is that you didn't read the comment you are replying to, so I am hoping that repeating it in more detail, as I have above, will result in you reading it.
But OP's point holds, all we are consuming is free energy (in the form of oil deposits, ore deposits, etc). And helium (in the form of gas, which escapes the atmosphere). Nothing else.
Instead, watch the atoms you learned about in chemistry class, which have the advantage of being real. They're generally conserved. (Not 100%, but places where we're changing atoms are very fringe in our economy.) Converting paper into a mushy mess is just introducing entropy into the paper. With energy invested we can turn those atoms back into paper. With our current tech level that may be a very long, winding, expensive journey, but it could be easier. Plus as we develop tech, we will start tending to prefer organizations of atoms that are easier to create in the first place, which is why you hear about things like the "diamond age".
With enough energy, we can rearrange atoms in almost any way we'd like. We don't dump things in landfills because we have no use for the atoms, we dump them there because it's too energetically expensive to undo the entropy introduced into them by our usage that has put them in their current high-entropy, low-use configuration. If we solved that problem, landfills wouldn't exist. That's a big "if", absolutely, no denying it. But if you, say, really passionately wanted to solve the landfill problem and not just nibble around the edges, this is the angle you should be taking.
https://www.triplepundit.com/2011/09/belgian-company-leads-l...
The dissertation [1] is a collection of four papers on the focused topic of heavy metal values and safety in recovery.
At least now we'll maybe have less bragging about not putting materials into landfills! [2]
[1] http://lnu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?aq2=%5B%5B%5D%5D...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sweden-s-recycling...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-42990661/how-meat-is...
The vegetables were kept in a separate wheely-bin from the skips, so it was a lot more hygienic than just diving into a dumpster with everything mixed in. The bread was also kept in separate bags, next to the dumpsters. I think that all the discarded bread and vegetables went to local farmers for animal feed.
Only a tiny subset of food is legally required to have an expiration date. In the UK this is the "use by" date. In Canada it's the "expiration date." But, you'll find this, or "best by" dates on way more products, because they want to move more product.
In the US, for example, only infant formula is required by federal law to have an expiration date (1). The same page states that: "Foods not exhibiting signs of spoilage should be wholesome and may be sold, purchased, donated and consumed beyond the labeled "Best if Used By" date."
(1) https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety...
The legality and morality of donating food past its expiration date is somewhat murky and different depending on jurisdiction. I know France passed a law specifically allowing the practice, and its at least tolerated in Germany.
Is this feasible now? I have no idea. But it is inevitable.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/170872-wayfarers
[1] Although this is obviously dark, the series is generally feel good sci-fi, enjoyable and worth checking out.
Methane is also captured and converted into electricity, though it’s more to keep the landfill from exploding and for greenhouse gas reduction.
I would think the waste management companies have this on lockdown but maybe I'm mistaken.
Certainly seems worth doing and there seem to be profits possible in it (not to mention possible social and environmental benefits).
China just recently banned the import of bulk plastic, which has had repercussions far and wide, especially in the EU. There are automatic sorting machines, including many by startups. But the problem is quite hard.
Ultimately product packaging may need to change, too. Currently, a bag for coffee may contain ten layers of different plastics, metals, and papers, all fused together.