Producing graphene in bulk using waste food, plastic and other materials
news.rice.edu
news.rice.edu
Tour hopes to produce a kilogram a day of flash graphene within two years
Ah, scaling problems.
Plastic, on the other hand, just sits there and we have not been able to put it back into the carbon cycle. Turning them into an advanced material like graphene is great.
In theory it’s a great way to reduce this non ecological material into fuel, in return into something that is ecologically compatible.
plastic is just fuckd
Yes, but it just kills the climate.
The current climate issue movement fails to address the ecological problems at hand. It’s all about co2 levels and not about healthy ecosystems and integrating back into nature. Plastic waste is really fucking up out planet.
How strictly is that enforced? And is it applied without exceptions? For example I compost but if I have something oily I'm going to compost it because oily soil isn't great.
Anecdotally, I’m a CA homeowner and this is the first I’ve heard of it.
Seattle has something like that too, when I lived there seven years ago. We were provided bins for composting, and compost bins were in every resturant I went to.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/new-california-compost-law...
It also depends on how you are composting. The main problem with composting oily food is that the oil goes rancid. There are solutions for that.
Black Soldier Flies Larvae can eat that stuff, and are symbiotic to human activity. (They stay in one place, drive out the other species of flies, and don't go after humans). If you have a red earthworm composting bin, you'd feed the BSFL stuff that you don't want to feed the worms. (You'd feed the worms the best stuff and give the rest to the BSFL).
Industrial composters will just throw them all in big piles and they will eventually compost. Some might implement ideas from Paul Stamets and cultivate fungi on the heaps to help it break down faster.
Usually though, what we have in the US is that foodwaste goes to landfills (bad), and then lawns are grown with fertilizers (instead of compost). That's a much larger carbon cycle that ends up depleting the land in multiple ways. Let's not even get to how wasteful we get with water management -- pumping water, purifying them to drinking water standards, and then watering lawns with them.
Carbon that is eaten and used by plants, sequestered in soil are bio-available in the ecosystem, and if designed well, then there can be many kinds of yields useful for human. Healthy soil -- not dirt! -- with living organisms holding it, has a dramatic effect on the microclimate of the area, and helps regulate the microclimate across the solar cycle.
When you have bare dirt, and no plants or anything living there, then the area gains more temperature variability.
Because of the way we farm in the modern world, we leave a lot of bare dirt around. Thermal satallites show a rise in temperature every year during the planting and harvesting seasons. The idea of reducing carbon emissions from industrial processes and cars will not reduce the climate extremes we are seeing. Having better land management, tightening up carbon and water cycles in microclimates helps a lot more, and have many beneficial side-effects (such as reducing weath inequality gaps, having stronger more cohesive communities)
But an example of what I am talking about. The film is focused more on better water management, but it's integrated with bringing fertility back to a wasteland. The water harvesting strutures discussed in the video are dug in a way that also accumulates organic matter so that topsoil can rebuild on what is otherwise bedrock. https://youtu.be/KtHuIlfyJao
This was my first thought. I agree. The minerals and nutrients are much more valuable as fertilizer. I think we rely too heavily on synthetic fertilizer and fail to realize how much arable land we throw away each year (by not reintroducing the waste to the lands).
And if waste food becomes a major resource, that acts as a direct encouragement to subsidize food overproduction, which is not really a bad thing(nobody wants their nation to starve in a bad season).
There's a carbon cycle of plants -> oil -> plastics -> burn in air -> plants -> oil ... And that cycle takes a long time.
But the carbon cycle I am thinking of is one that makes the carbon in the plastics bio-available to plants directly. That means greater fertility, greater food abundance, food sovereignty, better land management.
Trying to stuff the carbon from plastics back into rock does not give us greater fertility, food abundance or food sovereignty. If anything, it will increase the wealth inequality gap, and makes it harder to feed everyone.
We're not quite there yet. The key is being able to safely composting plastics, and that means finding or breeding microorganisms that are capable of eating it. What we would have to give up are the properties of plastic that our modern society is addicted to ... something that _doesn't_ biodegrade, durable and cheap enough to be used ubiquitously.
However, I still think that in the short term, stopping the oil/gas/plastic carbon cycle and finding ways to reverse it, to reduce climate change is much more important for the planet and humanity.
In addition, we need to think about stabilising the human population (encouraging birth control etc) both for climate change and ecological/species survival reasons.
Once we have solved/stablised/reversed Earth's ecological problems then maybe we can think about integrating plastics back into the shorter carbon cycle safely.
That's where a lab scientists keeps both feet in the ground, makes sensible estimate, and fears missing them.
Whereas an Elon-type would already have promissed a ton per seconds by the end of the year - and maybe the simple fact of stupidly overcommiting would actually make things a _bit_ faster.
Good luck to them anyway, seems like a cool process.
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/masks-early-pulmonar...
Ben from NightHawkInLight has a good "DIY" video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Et8FEbCuCs
The flip side is, I wonder if this could be scaled down to a home device for processing plastics. It doesn't even have to produce graphene.
You have enough compost? Send it to countries where deserts destroy farmland.
Not trying to snark, I’m genuinely interested in seeing the counter arguments. Thanks
First, it probably isn't monolayer, but rather variable layer numbers, so practically speaking... it's probably graphite.
Second, there is likely to be a lot of defects. So you don't get the full strength that you would find with single crystal exfoliated or epitaxially grown graphene.
Still, I would imagine that a method like this could be useful, particularly if you were building a colony off-world. You don't need high-quality graphene for making composites for construction.
He didn't explain in details saying telling more would be intellectual property breach and that a lot of companies are searching for flash joule like techniques and if they were working they'd be in use yesterday.
It is not technically graphene due to the multicrysal + variable layer formation. You can search my user name in google scholar to see my publications.
do you know any good places to read, or sites to follow about graphene research ?
I was interested in the flash joule thing to play with conductive ink or insulations..
Wasn't the same thing said for asbestos cement?
I wonder if the walls are made of graphene reinforced concrete, if I drill some holes, how dangerous is it?
I imagine the danger isn't significantly increased unless the graphene is layered thickly enough that the concrete doesn't bond all the way through it. Either you're worried about concrete dust, or you are worried about graphene dust. Concrete dust with bonded bits of graphene are going to be the same physical size as concrete, so I wouldn't expect it to be significantly more dangerous combined.