Cool project, but that ratio seems very ineffective. Especially since there is a realistic chance this ends up in landfill within some decades anyway.
Cool project, but that ratio seems very ineffective. Especially since there is a realistic chance this ends up in landfill within some decades anyway.
95+% of the carbon footprint of plastics comes from production and manufacturing.
Yes and no. Oil is cracked down for lots of different things, but one of the things that people are really aiming for is ethane which can be used to make industrial ethanol, and a lot of plastics.
What you end up with to get there is lots of propane and butane, which is used as a fuel gas, but most of that ends up going up the flare stack because there's so much of it. We won't stop doing this while we still use plastics and fertiliser.
You need very clean propane or butane for things like cooking stoves, but you can run car engines on it just fine because they're so much less picky, and the exhaust gases are far cleaner than engines run on heavier fractions like oh maybe octane. This is why things like warehouse forklifts run on gas instead of diesel or petrol - you don't die if you breathe in the fumes, because there's no unburnt fuel or carbon monoxide, because it runs as lean as a vegan's dog.
The amount of gas flared globally adds up to little over 1% of global energy production. I know that doesn't sound like much but we're talking like terawatts. It truly is a mind boggling amount of energy that gets wasted because we simply can't get it to users cheap enough.
Or we can't get it clean enough to use as say cooking gas or aerosol propellant.
Stick it in cars, they'll burn any old shite and emit water and carbon dioxide - two terrible greenhouse gases, for sure, but you'll extract useful work from it instead of literally just heating the atmosphere for the fun of it.
Again though flaring it off in a gas turbine to generate electricity and heat would be ultimately less harmful than just letting it out into the air.
By contrast the tank in an LPG vehicle is at around 8 bar, not a hell of a lot more than the pressure in a truck's tyres. On my old Range Rover the LPG tank is considerably less spicy than the air suspension tank at 15 bar, which is getting into "this can injure you" territory.
Of course, Romania had oil too, but it was exporting most of it, and there was a lot of natural gas left over.
I think you're full of shit.
It far more effective than building a collage with bought or new printed parts
Do this thing: 10 pounds of filament poop still exists, + 8 pounds of glue sticks (which is basically a thermoplastic) used, to create something that's eventually going to end up in a landfill.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Recycling or reuse is not as useful as just not creating waste in the first place.
Let’s say every month the artist repurposes the last pile of plastic with more glue. At the end of one year, the 10lbs would turn into 1100lbs. At the end of two years the original 10lbs would have turned into 1.3 million lbs of plastic waste. Surely that would frame a very powerful message about plastic waste and green washing misleading public policy.
Reuse is good if the activity replaces something that would generate more waste. This is the real benchmark, not the case where someone does nothing.
The most efficient thing is always to do nothing and/or kill oneself. This isnt practical, so reusing used materials instead of new when you do something is still net good.