17 Dec
2011
17 Dec
'11
9:51 a.m.
At 11:06 AM 12/17/2011, Toby Thain wrote:
What an astonishingly inefficient process. It's
much harder to get non-renewable materials out of unmarked landfills with random contents
than it was to get them out of the earth in the first place. Why. Not. Recycle. Properly.
Usually because people don't want to pay to make it easy to recycle.
Although mining landfills sounds like fun, I can't help but think that
they'll run into things they wish they hadn't found, and then will be
asked to clean up those old messes, too. A landfill from the 1990s
is a different beast compared to a "dump" in the 1940s. I might want
to go mining for tantalum and gold, but I might still dig into an
acre of paint residues.
Speaking of bursting electrolytics, hasn't anyone developed a quick
test to detect the ones with the chemicals? When it first started
happening, I heard the excuse it was a case of industrial espionage
gone wrong where an ingredient was left out of the recipe. Now it
sounds like it's done as a cost savings.
- John