6 ms·
Pretty much everything is a raw material of the future. Even household waste has much higher concentrations of metals than most ore deposits.
by WJW 5y ago
Pretty much everything is a raw material of the future. Even household waste has much higher concentrations of metals than most ore deposits.
- plebianRube 5y agoThat sandwich you're eating? Made from old recycled half eaten sandwiches.
- kragen 5y agoActually your sandwich is made from poop. The poop fertilized plants, the plants were harvested, some of them were turned into bread, others fed a pig, and that's what you're eating. Some of the poop decayed and was released as gases into the air, which were then recaptured by the plants, by bacteria in the roots of soybeans, and by Haber-Bosch factories (confusingly also called plants) which made synthetic fertilizer to fertilize the plants further. You are recycling your sandwich, made from poop, into more poop. This is the reflection on the disgusting nature of food and its link to the interdependent arising of all things. Your existence is inextricably linked to the existence of the pig and the poop. They are not separate processes; they are different focuses in the same process.
- Reason077 5y ago"The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff." —Carl Sagan
- kragen 5y agoYes. Also poop. (Though the atomic nuclei didn't originate in the poop; they were just passing through. But cobalamin molecules, for example, do originate in poop pretty often.)
- ajross 5y agoFWIW: Sagan was poetic but the intuition turns out to have been wrong. Models are still not super convincing, but supernovae alone aren't enough to explain the abundance of heavy elements. A big chunk of the rare earth nuclei we apply in industry today seem likely to be tiny remnants of neutron stars that were thrown off in a merger event with another neutron star or black hole.
- 908B64B197 5y agoThat's even cooler.
- loufe 5y agoThanks for bringing this up! I was always curious and decided to research it. The graphic at the top of this Phys article describes the origins of all elements on the periodic table. It claims that only a small number of elements were remnants of neutron stars, however. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-elements-neutron-stars-contribute-gold.html https://phys.org/news/2020-09-elements-neutron-stars-contrib... >Half of all the elements that are heavier than iron—such as thorium and uranium—were thought to be made when neutron stars, the superdense remains of burnt-out suns, crashed into one another. Long theorized, neutron star collisions were not confirmed until 2017. Now, however, fresh analysis by Karakas and fellow astronomers Chiaki Kobayashi and Maria Lugaro reveals that the role of neutron stars may have been considerably overestimated—and that another stellar process altogether is responsible for making most of the heavy elements.
- alisonkisk 5y agoHuh? Are humans made of heavy elements?
- saagarjha 5y agoFor astronomers, “heavy” generally means “not formed by stellar nucleosynthesis”.
- amelius 5y agoThis is the same as the endless recycling of water.
- kragen 5y agoYes, Thich Nhat Hanh uses the example of the hydrological cycle instead of poop: "That watermelon is made of clouds."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- svth 5y agoHAMLET Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end. KING CLAUDIUS Alas, alas! HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. KING CLAUDIUS What dost you mean by this? HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.
- jahnu 5y agoOnly a tiny amount of it though. It's almost all made from air.
- Benjamin_Dobell 5y agoPretty sure it's just a (slightly misquoted) Futurama reference.
- tomcam 5y agoI save time and just eat the poop directly
- hinkley 5y agoThey should be made from poop, but it’s more fossil fuels than poop at the moment. If you count CO2 as “poop” the percentages rise but the fossils still are in the lead.
- teddyh 5y ago> That sandwich you're eating? Made from old recycled half eaten sandwiches. For reference, that’s a Futurama quote.
- agumonkey 5y agoHeh was about to say this. Also, how much is the recycling industry can absorb the potential flood of old ICE cars ?
- WJW 5y agoRecycling of old cars is already pretty well developed. You drain the old fluids and strip any parts with secondary market value, then compact the whole thing and tip it whole into a steel melting furnace. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQHKUpwMboY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQHKUpwMboY
- agumonkey 5y agoyes but the rate of recycling may explode due to EVs (potentially)
- alex_young 5y agoEspecially when one of the lithium packs winds up in the furnace.
- WJW 5y agoGiven the rate at which these electric arc furnaces convert electricity into heat already, I don't think that a few hundred gigajoule extra from a random battery pack is going to matter all that much.
- kingsuper20 5y agoAlso, I expect that an industry that deals with removing eleventy seven airbags to keep the children safe can handle main battery removal.
- alisonkisk 5y agoBattery explosions are common in waste management facilities. It's a problem.
- dkarp 5y agoPeople don’t realise this when they think of landfill. In future, we could have an effective way of mining landfill for resources. Some forms of recycling now are highly inefficient and it’s conceivable that we’d be better off utilizing landfill and recycling with better techniques later.
- bombcar 5y agoThere’s an argument for doing roughly the recycling sorting we do now and then just burying it.
- kingsuper20 5y ago>People don’t realise this when they think of landfill. I expect you'll see increasing mining of tailings piles as things like gold extraction technology improves.
- loufe 5y agoReprocessing gold tailings for old mines with more effective and robust methods has been tried recently. I remember looking into it but IIRC the few examples I found had all folded. I really do hope we do get to the point where we can reprocess almost any solid mass into useable compounds, though.
- hinkley 5y agoI think the trick will be if you can extract funding from the public for remediation and make your profit off of the materials recovered from said tailings. The thing is now you’re rewarding an industry for making a mess in the first place, which is a bad pattern.
- coryrc 5y agoWhen we extract ore from a given area, it's mixed with just a few different compounds. So you tailor various acids and processes to economically filter out just want you need. How do you plan to do this when you have every compound we've ever created with overlapping solubilities and you want pure output?
- gilbetron 5y agoAs with most places, our municipal recycling system just throws away most of what it receives (but that looks like it is changing soon-ish, maybe). My wife really virtue signals by wanting to recycle everything, and gets annoyed if I throw something that is "recyclable". I just tell her that recycling deprive the future waste miners of their livelihood :) I joke, but I do believe there will be "waste miners" at some point in the future.
- pfdietz 5y agoIn the post fossil fuel age, the waste stream will be a valuable source of reduced carbon for use in polymers and chemicals, and perhaps in specialized applications where chemical fuels are still needed (like long distance aircraft).