17 Dec
2011
17 Dec
'11
10:50 a.m.
On 17/12/11 12:51 PM, John Foust wrote:
At 11:06 AM 12/17/2011, Toby Thain wrote:
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
...
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.
Yes. So you'd have to be prepared in advance for every kind of toxic
event. Expensive, slow and difficult.
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.
It looks to me like these are just very cheap (= poorly made) parts,
combined with inattention to things like thermal design. But since the
designer benefits from all this corner-cutting, we have the status quo.
--Toby
- John