17 Dec
2011
17 Dec
'11
1:10 p.m.
On 17/12/11 2:38 PM, John Foust wrote:
At 12:50 PM 12/17/2011, Toby Thain wrote:
That's before it gets into a landfill. I'm referring to the insanity of
digging it up later when we run out of extractive materials. (Even
artificially, as in the example of China now controlling nearly all rare
earth resources.)
But it *doesn't* sound like fun! It sounds
like the worst possible way to do things.
1) first find the landfill
2) what's in it? usually nothing of interest
3) ugh, imagine what you'd have to wade throug to find any recyclable metal
As evidenced by what we see in many parts of the world, there are people
who will now do that picking. Maybe robots will do it more easily and
humanely. Similarly, your average waste pick-up company (at least here
in the States) is already harvesting as much as is easily picked out
by machine or human. After all, they're charged to put it in a landfill,
and they're paid to deliver a bundle of cardboard or plastic or scrap iron.
In your average modern anaerobic landfill, they're already harvesting
the methane from the decomposition of the organics. When you did hit
something plastic or metal, you know it is more concentrated than your
average strip-mine ore. It might not be what you really wanted to find.
Sure, it would be nifty if we could reduce it all to plasma and sort
by atomic weight, but I don't think energy will ever be that cheap.
Around here, the scrappers and recyclers are always eager when I tell them
I'm giving away a few big boxes of motherboards and power supplies.
Again, that's pre-landfill, and relatively efficient.
But how do we direct e-waste (for example) into the hands of people who
are picking it apart for non-renewables, rather than it ending up in
landfill by default? That's the unsolved part. Commodity prices may have
changed scrapper behaviour but haven't changed household behaviour yet.
About 60-70% of our household waste by volume goes into a recycling
pickup. I don't know what happens to it after that, but I am betting
that this percentage is higher than most of North America. At work, we
have an e-waste pickup. Unfortunately 90% (or more, I guess) of what is
dumped there is still serviceable (a whole other topic).
--T
- John