Is it really that simple? Is society really that dumb?
31 karma · joined February 3, 2023
Nothing is going to change until people are that enraged by it.
I want the public to get upset about this.
Also, can anyone articulate exactly what data the TV is scraping about your other network devices? IP, name, what else?
After several centuries, it’s hard to imagine that most landfills will still be doing regular maintenance and fighting off entropy maintaining the cap. At some point, with the right technology, it becomes more sensible to reprocess the waste in a more permanent manner.
I think plasma gasification is likely the best idea, but it still needs work.
That was my understanding the last time I worked on this. I would love to hear about any progress on this.
For what it’s worth, I think the companies that have tried this have not pursued the correct business model. They all either want to sell their system (bad idea) or sell syngas (ok, but not enough). What they need to do is charge tipping fees like a landfill to simply dispose of the trash.
InEnTec is the leading company in the space (as far as I can tell) because they have good scientific leadership, a good academic pedigree, and an investment by Waste Management.
The technology still has its challenges. It is hard to make it economical relative to alternatives, for one. I also think executives are not driving at the correct business model, overemphasizing syngas production and underemphasizing just getting rid of waste and possibly recovering metals.
But the biggest problem I see in terms of its viability for recycling is that it is all down cycling. Valuable and precious metals all end up in either a hugely challenging mixed alloy, or they get wasted in the vitrified slag output.
I have been trying to find someone who can clarify if any progress has been made on this.
If you are started with a single product (say a lithium ion battery), then you might stand a chance of developing a process that can recover a reasonable fraction of the metals.
But if you’re starting with a general pile of a bunch of stuff (CRTS, batteries, hard drives, PCBs, cables), it’s very difficult to optimize a process that catches even a modest amount of the valuable stuff. The metals are fused with nonmetallic stuff like plastic and ceramics. And the useful metals often end up being “down cycled” into less valuable alloys because they are difficult or uneconomical to separate. If that’s hard to believe, just try to think through how you would economically extract gold, silver, and copper from 100 kg of PCBs.
And the reality is that most ewaste does not come in nicely separated. The options are 1) spend extra money to have people separate stuff, 2) possibly develop AI systems to separate stuff, 3) have consumers separate their own stuff, or 4) develop better chemical processes that can actually handle a mixture.
I have tried to work on #4 with not much success. If anyone else has worked on this and would like to share their experience, drop a note.
Edit: another commenter drew the analogy to ore refining, but that’s not correct. Ores are much more homogenous relative to ewaste. It would be like if PCBS contained copper fused onto plexiglass—sure, then it would be easy to get at the copper. But it’s not just those two things—-it’s 100 things all bound together.
To me, it seems the problem nobody is addressing is how to recycle valuable metals without them becoming part of the slag (ie we need something that can be used to break down electronic components to their rare metals and then capture them usefully). Everything I’ve read seems to just ignore this. Have you any thoughts on this?
Lots of words describing the failures of the Statue of Liberty, but no words describing how the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the top of the Chrysler building (both stainless) have persisted for decades with absolutely zero corrosion. My understanding is that this has vastly exceeded the expectations of the initial engineers.
Stainless steel artifacts made today will still be around in a million years if they aren’t intentionally destroyed.
My inquiry basically amounts to whether anyone is working on these problems. There was a big push 10-20 years ago, but it seems people have given up.
There is plenty of land for landfills, but nobody wants them nearby. The bigger problem, however, is that in the long run, the encapsulations will all fail. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when. Until then, there are ongoing maintenance costs (such as mowing because you can’t let trees get root) that can add up quickly.
Someone has to work on this technology because it will eventually be needed for remediations (it already is needed for old, unlined landfills). It needs to capture the high-value metals (as you mentioned) and it needs to be economical in terms of initial capital costs as well as being at least energy neutral.
It doesn’t necessarily have to produce net energy since it can generate revenue the same way a landfill does (tipping fees), but it would be nice to at least get close to energy break even.
Anyway, I guess people have given up on this problem for now, sadly.
It has been tried in the real world. Belgium planned to use it for landfill mining, and Britain planned to built two plants to process fresh trash. But this has all been shut down at this point due to engineering challenges and economic challenges.
I’m trying to find out if there is anyone out there trying to still plug away at this and make progress?
If you have a stored drive that is reporting errors, my starting assumption would be that something else is causing problems besides the platter—maybe the heads have gotten a bit of corrosion from humidity.
Still disagree?
I do archive work and have 20+ discs from the 2010 era. Mostly the first generation of PMR drives. I have never had any data degradation problems.
You can also find lots of YouTube videos of people spinning up drives from the 80s and 90s which still hold their data without problem.
More scientifically, the phenomenon you talk about is modeled by the Arrhenius equation (1), where the activation energy to flip a grain is given by KuV/KbT, where Ku is the anisotropy of the magnetic media, V is the volume of a grain, Kb is the Boltzmann constant, and T is temp in Kelvin.
HDD manufacturers engineer this ratio to be >60 (usually targeting 70-90 to be safe). Media manufacturing is imperfect, so there is a log normal distribution of grains on real-world media, but if we assume that 60 is the energy barrier for all grains, a KuV/KbT of 60 would mean it takes 362 million years for half the grains to flip, assuming an attempt frequency of 10^10.
Where is my math wrong?
Yes they can fail mechanically (is this what you mean?) but you don’t necessarily lose your data.
These are two examples of an unhealthy industry that, as you say, still seems content to burn money.