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Garbage. How do you take a bag of mixed garbage and perform a fractional distillation of it, pulling out components and recycling and reusing them efficiently,

Garbage. How do you take a bag of mixed garbage and perform a fractional distillation of it, pulling out components and recycling and reusing them efficiently, until you are left with a tiny residue, ideally nothing, of true waste? How do you do this in a cost effective manner without relying on absurdly cheap labor and lax health, safety and environmental protection regulations?

MandieD 7y ago
Sadly I have but one upvote to give, because making that kind of optimal use of garbage would solve a bunch of other problems.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  It's also such a rich technical problem, that spans every sort of engineering, from machine learning to robotics to chemistry and materials engineering. And it's like, purely a technical business. If you have a company that can "buy" garbage for $X and sell your outputs for $Y > $X (+costs), you don't need to deal with politics and lobbying and building buzz.
  - louisguitton 7y ago
    200% agreed. But sadly, PhD positions in the field are so hard to find. A friend of mine is an engineer set out to do just that and even the biggest private sector players struggle to fund. Have you experienced the same?
buboard 7y ago
The question is even if it material separation worked, are they really being recycled?
- saalweachter 7y ago
  If your end product isn't salable, your job isn't done yet :-) For some components of "garbage", simple mechanical separation may be sufficient, and there may already be buyers happy to buy your product if you can reach a sufficient level of purity and offer it at a sufficiently low cost. Simply separating out those components of garbage efficiently enough is one huge unsolved problem, and once you have solved that, you can get to work on the fun part, which is how to further refine every unwanted component until you have broken it down or built it up into something someone wants.
seph-reed 7y ago
We can burn it for power (https://energynews.us/2013/10/17/midwest/is-burning-garbage-green-in-sweden-theres-little-debate/ https://energynews.us/2013/10/17/midwest/is-burning-garbage-...)

MandieD 7y ago

Sadly I have but one upvote to give, because making that kind of optimal use of garbage would solve a bunch of other problems.

saalweachter 7y ago
It's also such a rich technical problem, that spans every sort of engineering, from machine learning to robotics to chemistry and materials engineering. And it's like, purely a technical business. If you have a company that can "buy" garbage for $X and sell your outputs for $Y > $X (+costs), you don't need to deal with politics and lobbying and building buzz.
- louisguitton 7y ago
  200% agreed. But sadly, PhD positions in the field are so hard to find. A friend of mine is an engineer set out to do just that and even the biggest private sector players struggle to fund. Have you experienced the same?

buboard 7y ago

The question is even if it material separation worked, are they really being recycled?

saalweachter 7y ago
If your end product isn't salable, your job isn't done yet :-) For some components of "garbage", simple mechanical separation may be sufficient, and there may already be buyers happy to buy your product if you can reach a sufficient level of purity and offer it at a sufficiently low cost. Simply separating out those components of garbage efficiently enough is one huge unsolved problem, and once you have solved that, you can get to work on the fun part, which is how to further refine every unwanted component until you have broken it down or built it up into something someone wants.

seph-reed 7y ago

We can burn it for power (https://energynews.us/2013/10/17/midwest/is-burning-garbage-green-in-sweden-theres-little-debate/ https://energynews.us/2013/10/17/midwest/is-burning-garbage-...)