Comment by chimi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimi | Hacker News Reader

> What’s the “magic” behind this? Executives are coy, but biotechnology expert Oded Shoseyov, a Hebrew University professor who has consulted for UBQ, says melting plastics and waste creates a homogeneous substance strengthened by fibers in the organic ingredients.

The article then goes on to describe a typical waste recycling facility plus:

> a multi-chamber reactor that sits behind a closed sliding door to block prying eyes. Temperatures up to 400 degrees break down the organic matter into its core elements, and then it and the plastics are re-engineered into a matrix through chemical and physical reactions that UBQ keeps secret.

I fear there is really no story here. There is a lot of energy being put into this system. Something comes out, yes, but is it worth it? How is it better than a garbage incinerating facility?

There is no evidence presented that the material output is as good as the material input. Or that the energy required is less than traditional recycling methods.

This is way too early and way too long of an article to spend a lot of time on at this point.

Maybe we can use this and stop pulling new petroleum into the plastics cycle for most products. That would let us leave more of it in the ground. And this also lets us prevent the gases from the food, much of it generated using petroleum products, from entering the atmosphere, effectively sequestering carbon into the products.

If all the system really needs is heat and mechanical energy we can generate that in spades from sunlight. In fact, the sun is far more efficient at directly heating things up than it is at being turned into electricity. So we could actually have a recycling plant that for certain kinds of materials is far greener than throwing the materials away.

First we need to demonstrate that the process works, and that we can spend the energy to make something useful. Then we figure out if we can source the energy from somewhere green.

The only real questions I have are what are the chemical inputs, and where do they come from? And can those chemical inputs be generated directly using heat or do they require electricity?

It's interesting because it suggests that we can build a recycling machine that takes garbage and heat and outputs usable materials.

It suggests that's possible, but we know that's possible already.

The hard part of plastics recycling which is already being done at various scales is isolating the plastic. How do you get foodstuffs out of plastic containers? How do you separate the components of waste, basically?

It's like cleaning metal by burning off everything that burns until all you have is metal. You're just moving the waste from one place to another.

In this case, the gasses are getting into the atmosphere just like they would at a traditional incinerating waste facility and there are lots of those already. They are not a good solution for the long term.

When people are being "coy" about something as the article indicates, there's usually a reason. In this case, I think it's because the solution solves the problem, but not better than existing technology and they don't want that to be revealed to the open market that would tear it apart.

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