11 ms·

We need to design devices such as batteries for recycling and long life from the design phase of the products. Solid-state Lithium batteries will probably be ea

by acd 5y ago

We need to design devices such as batteries for recycling and long life from the design phase of the products. Solid-state Lithium batteries will probably be easier to recycle due to no sandwiching. "The immediate benefit of switching from a liquid to solid electrolyte is that the energy density of the battery can increase. This is because instead of requiring large separators between the liquid cells, solid state batteries only require very thin barriers to prevent a short circuit." This separator material complicates recycling in conventional Lithium ion batteries. Instead of assuming we have endless resources we should design all products to recyclable from the start design phase. This is to lessen global warming and environmental impact.

jacquesm 5y ago
Absolutely. A friend - who has passed away - had a great idea: tax companies for resources consumed. That would go a long way towards treating everything that we mine as precious, rather than just those items that we can already see the bottom of the barrel on (and taking into account that mining is creating an enormous amount of pollution). Properly designed items should be easier, cheaper and quicker to recycle than to start with a mining step. One of the important bits here is now the various materials are joined, specifically, gluing is a barrier to recycling, as are various surface coatings. This is where I think we could make a very quick step in the right direction by designing not just for manufacturing costs but also for the cost of breaking the produced item up into its constituent elements. Penalties for the fraction that can not be reliable returned to its pre-manufacture state, as well as an automatic obligation to take back and recycle any product produced.
- dsego 5y ago
  Sounds like Georgism.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- djur 5y ago
  You could get a lot of the way there if governments didn't sell or lease extraction rights at a bargain. And they do that for a number of reasons, but mostly because extraction and processing of natural resources is good for local economies. This is what ended up causing the "Sagebrush Rebellion" in the western United States, which is an ongoing political issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_Rebellion
  - epistasis 5y ago
    Yes, the Georgist solution is similar to what Norway has done with its oil resources, which have collectively made Norway immensely wealthy in comparison to the petroleum states elsewhere around the world. The difference is whether the state will be allowed to profit from its own resources, or is the nation under the thumb of a more militarily powerful nation and there exploited by foreign capital. We let Norway exploit its resources its own way, in other nations we have interfered mightily to better our own interests at the expense of the populations of the nation that owns the oil resource.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  How do you price the tax? Like if you buy natural gas from a responsibly run source that does a good job and has low emissions and I buy it from some terrible company that does a shite job, do we pay the same tax per unit of gas consumed?
  - mikewave 5y ago
    One mechanism is to design the tax to be revenue-neutral for the average taxpayer. For example, with carbon taxes on gasoline, we can calculate what the average person consumes in terms of gasoline per year, and then calculate the outliers (people with super-efficient cars and people with gas guzzlers). Then, we establish some reasonable maximum that we think we can get away with surcharging the guzzlers, and establish a gradient. The average person is given back a tax break that corresponds to the surcharge they'll pay at the pump, so it's a wash for them; the guzzler gets the tax break too but ends up paying more, incentivizing everyone to be the efficient driver who basically gets a bonus. I think you could do the same for any kind of tax; establish the baseline for resource consumption efficiency for a particular recyclable commodity (and it will have to be per-commodity to make any sense at all); set up the incentive gradient so that companies producing more-recyclable-than-average goods end up getting free cash for doing so, hopefully offsetting the other costs associated with this, and companies producing things that are harder or impossible to recycle end up paying more. The end result is that the product for the consumer that is more recyclable should end up making more financial sense. Instead of pinning the gradient the way you do for gas (literally, 'what they can get away with and still get elected'), you'd pin it at a level where it incentivizes companies themselves to be purchasing recycled materials instead of new ones. All of the above is predicated on the material in question being able to be recycled without requiring more energy input / producing a higher carbon footprint to recycle than acquiring the original raw product is. There are some materials that it's just not worth to recycle, most of the time; plastic is definitely on that side for now, like it or not.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  an entropy tax ?
- asimpletune 5y ago
  > tax companies for resources consumed I feel like so much could be fixed by just making things cost their true price.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    What _is_ the true price of a resource though? You have to ration it out for a certain length of time, but what is the end date? Do we ensure we have supply for 100 years? 1000? I'm not trying to shit on the idea because I think we genuinely need to do something but I can't come up with any rational way to calculate the true cost of limited resources.
    - asimpletune 5y ago
      I think that's the real question. How much does it cost to add a bunch of packaging that serves no purpose other than to sell the item? I have no idea. At the same, I don't think doing nothing at all a good alternative. If anything I don't even think this is the biggest obstacle. That's probably the fact that literally no country in the world wants to volunteer to put themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
      - webmaven 5y ago
        > I think that's the real question. How much does it cost to add a bunch of packaging that serves no purpose other than to sell the item? I have no idea. I think that it has been established that the cost of packaging is smaller than the marginal increase in profits from greater sales (from the perspective of the manufacturers and retailers). In theory, an AR-heavy economy could displace packaging costs with AR facsimiles overlaid on generic (even standardized) packaging, but I don't think that would be a win, energy-wise.
        Gigachad 5y ago
        At least the future is online sales which do not need fancy packaging. Although they do often involve an extra plastic shipping bag.
- Gene_Parmesan 5y ago
  There was a really interesting (and disheartening) story by NPR this year about recycling in the US: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-worth-it-anymore-people-on-the-front-lines-say-maybe-not https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-... One of the comments made was that consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. In reality, the system we have only works if there are companies that want to actually use the recycled materials. If there are none, it just gets landfilled. I bring this up because one of the things mentioned was Pringles cans. Everyone thinks they are recyclable. But the can is two sheets of cardboard glued over a thin sheet of aluminum. The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people. So the cans just get thrown out. In fact some people make arguments that recycling programs do more harm than good, because they allow consumers to alleviate their guilt about waste without actually helping the environment. The cynic may say that's intentional.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    > consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. Consumers were told that by the local authorities who put these recycling programs in place. They were not told that behind the scenes it all goes to the landfill anyway. If they knew the truth they might actually make more effort to reduce the amount of stuff they throw out and be more aware of wasteful packaging.
    - amatecha 5y ago
      I really see this as a problem further up the chain - why is wasteful packaging even on the shelves? Why is there so much crap to throw out? Why was it legal to wrap a product in another 25% of its weight in useless, non-recyclable packaging? I'm not sure why I as an individual am forced to bear the brunt of colossally wasteful pipelines and processes that I had no say in. I can do a bit and reuse bags, buy stuff with minimal packaging (or avoid buying new stuff etc.), but broadly, I have no choice most of the time.
- vidarh 5y ago
  It's not perfect, but Norway has a tax on drinks containers that is set up so that the starting point is a tax on drinks containers. However any drinks containers you recycle is offset against the tax. Then there's a government endorsed recycling scheme that handles all but the collection for you, but requires that you participate in collecting containers irrespective of whether you sold them or not. So the default assumption is that if you do your job, the tax is more of a deposit. If you don't do your job, you, or rather your customers are still paying, and your customers can drive down the cost of your competitors by helping increase their tax offset if you make it a hassle to return things at yours. By creating the presumption that you ought to be able to collect and recycle most of the recyclable products you sell (return rate for cans and bottles is well over 90%), the tax/deposit can be set fairly high. High enough and you create secondary businesses taking the hassle of returns for those who can't be bothered (don't want to return your bottle in Norway? odds are someone who needs the money will fish it out of the trash to collect the deposit), and there's a strong incentive for businesses to take back anything they sell subject to such taxes/deposits and deliver them to whichever scheme is approved to offset against their tax bill. This sounds relatively close in principle to an implementation of what you're suggesting. with penalties etc. implemented basically by tallying up the tax per unit sold and then reducing the liability per unit recycled, so the penalty is simply the default if you fail to recycle.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    That's a pretty good implementation of the concept.
  - adamparsons 5y ago
    Handful of states and territories in Australia are doing this, and while I like the idea I haven't found a single person who has returned their bottles (including myself), instead just absorbed the additional cost into their expenses.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      Then it's not high enough. The cost needs to be high enough to either get really high return rates and/or to cover the costs to society of undoing whatever damage is done by what is left. Note that a key part is also that the most convenient option offered to comply needs to be to participate in recycling. In Norway you hand bottles or cans in pretty much anywhere that sells them. Which means most people just bring them in next time they go to the grocery store. If you require people to bring them to special recycling locations you should expect return rates to plummet.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I really hope Lithium recycling isn't like plastic recycling: sell it to China and then end up screwed when they stop buying it. Plastic recycling has pretty much been a multi-decade lie. Let's not bone ourselves with Lithium. Who am I kidding, humans are great at boning themselves.
- m0zg 5y ago
  IIRC it's not "recycling" at all - they'd just bury the plastic in China instead of here. Much like we've "reduced emissions" by moving all industrial production to China which is almost completely un-regulated in terms of emissions until 2030. It's as though people think that atmospheric emissions are somehow confined to the country which emits them, rather than affect the entire planet.
- not2b 5y ago
  I don't see why it would be at all like plastic recycling: plastic "recycling" was never practical because there are too many kinds of plastic and making new plastic is so much cheaper. When the Chinese were buying it they were landfilling most of it in exchange for payments to take it off of our hands. On the other hand, aluminum recycling works very well.
  - lrem 5y ago
    I'm slightly surprised by landfilling plastic. I hear it's pretty high calorie, up to the point of being energy-positive to burn it with filtering out the fumes. Is it just not enough to make this money-positive when accounting for handling?
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Some places do have energy and material recovery facilities next to their landfills that try to extract useful metal and useful energy from trash.
    - dnautics 5y ago
      I believe Japan does this, but there are dioxins all over the place there.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
We could also stop soldering batteries to things. It's a lot easier to recycle a battery that can be easily removed than one which is permanently attached to a circuit board.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  The majority of Lithium-Ion batteries are spot welded rather than soldered (soldering injects a lot of heat), which makes recycling battery packs a rather time consuming and annoying job. The best is probably to grind them up and then to create a sludge and do a sort by centrifuge or some other bulk method of processing the materials. A typical Lithium-Ion cell contains Aluminum, steel, possibly a protection circuit (fibreglass, electronics components), carbon, copper, an electrolyte with lithium in solution and quite probably other elements besides.
agumonkey 5y ago
Are there places (online, or else), journals, channels about a more recycling minded society ? both at the average joe but also at the industrial/technological level ?
- teamonkey 5y ago
  Not exactly what you’re after, but https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
gotstad 5y ago
Adding to this, we should view raw materials used in production as something we "borrow" from the earth that must be returned. And the cost of returning them - through disassembly and recycling - should be reflected in the price of the final product. Right-to-repair friendly products would thus get an immediate advantage owing to their ease of disassembly.
- Osiris 5y ago
  This. I've been thinking about this for a while. In economics we talk about externalities, or costs tht are burdened by society but not the producer, making prices artificially low. I would love to see some mechanism in place to make sure that firms bare the cost of externalities. In this case, maybe firms are required to fund the cost of recycling their products which would incentive them to reduce the cost of recycling. Yes the cost of products will go up, but in a direct relationship to removing the cost to society and making sure products are properly priced. I'm purposefully simplifying this because the actual methodology to make this happen is incredibly complicated.
  - jimmySixDOF 5y ago
    >Yes the cost of products will go up If someone told me all this $3T extra spending in the US was to offset the costs of producing a more Circular Economy then I'd agree it would be a future generation's money well spent for good reasons.
baybal2 5y ago
> "The immediate benefit of switching from a liquid to solid electrolyte is that the energy density of the battery can increase. This is because instead of requiring large separators between the liquid cells, solid state batteries only require very thin barriers to prevent a short circuit." This is BS. Modern separators are microns thin.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mc32 5y ago
I believe that the auto industry had an aim for “green manufacturing” by 2000. The idea was to build cars such that a car could be taken apart as easily as it was put together on the assembly line (no crushing or inceneration, in other words), this would enable easy recapturing of recyclable components. But apparently this was more a pipe dream than reality as far as I can tell.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  The situation has definitely improved since the 80's, but there is a long, long way to go to reach the original goal.
  - collegeburner 5y ago
    Seems like cars are much less reparable than those from the 80s which are then worse than 60s. Electronics are part of this, but so is making cars lighter, more integrated, more fuel efficient. Old cars it is e.g much easier to do a tranny rebuild, new ones they are too damn sensitive and its much harder, and this extends to doing basically any repair. If larger laptops that are easier to repair are good for consumers you'd think so would cars like that, but no, fuel efficiency must trump all.
    - mc32 5y ago
      There are car mfgs where you have to maintain pretty strict voltages as you reprogram modules else they will brick themselves. They want to prevent Garage Joe or Jane from fixing his or her own car and instead have them go to the dealership and prevents owners from using used parts -so less "green".

by acd 5y ago

jacquesm 5y ago

Absolutely. A friend - who has passed away - had a great idea: tax companies for resources consumed. That would go a long way towards treating everything that we mine as precious, rather than just those items that we can already see the bottom of the barrel on (and taking into account that mining is creating an enormous amount of pollution). Properly designed items should be easier, cheaper and quicker to recycle than to start with a mining step. One of the important bits here is now the various materials are joined, specifically, gluing is a barrier to recycling, as are various surface coatings. This is where I think we could make a very quick step in the right direction by designing not just for manufacturing costs but also for the cost of breaking the produced item up into its constituent elements. Penalties for the fraction that can not be reliable returned to its pre-manufacture state, as well as an automatic obligation to take back and recycle any product produced.

dsego 5y ago
Sounds like Georgism.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
djur 5y ago
You could get a lot of the way there if governments didn't sell or lease extraction rights at a bargain. And they do that for a number of reasons, but mostly because extraction and processing of natural resources is good for local economies. This is what ended up causing the "Sagebrush Rebellion" in the western United States, which is an ongoing political issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagebrush_Rebellion
- epistasis 5y ago
  Yes, the Georgist solution is similar to what Norway has done with its oil resources, which have collectively made Norway immensely wealthy in comparison to the petroleum states elsewhere around the world. The difference is whether the state will be allowed to profit from its own resources, or is the nation under the thumb of a more militarily powerful nation and there exploited by foreign capital. We let Norway exploit its resources its own way, in other nations we have interfered mightily to better our own interests at the expense of the populations of the nation that owns the oil resource.
maxerickson 5y ago
How do you price the tax? Like if you buy natural gas from a responsibly run source that does a good job and has low emissions and I buy it from some terrible company that does a shite job, do we pay the same tax per unit of gas consumed?
- mikewave 5y ago
  One mechanism is to design the tax to be revenue-neutral for the average taxpayer. For example, with carbon taxes on gasoline, we can calculate what the average person consumes in terms of gasoline per year, and then calculate the outliers (people with super-efficient cars and people with gas guzzlers). Then, we establish some reasonable maximum that we think we can get away with surcharging the guzzlers, and establish a gradient. The average person is given back a tax break that corresponds to the surcharge they'll pay at the pump, so it's a wash for them; the guzzler gets the tax break too but ends up paying more, incentivizing everyone to be the efficient driver who basically gets a bonus. I think you could do the same for any kind of tax; establish the baseline for resource consumption efficiency for a particular recyclable commodity (and it will have to be per-commodity to make any sense at all); set up the incentive gradient so that companies producing more-recyclable-than-average goods end up getting free cash for doing so, hopefully offsetting the other costs associated with this, and companies producing things that are harder or impossible to recycle end up paying more. The end result is that the product for the consumer that is more recyclable should end up making more financial sense. Instead of pinning the gradient the way you do for gas (literally, 'what they can get away with and still get elected'), you'd pin it at a level where it incentivizes companies themselves to be purchasing recycled materials instead of new ones. All of the above is predicated on the material in question being able to be recycled without requiring more energy input / producing a higher carbon footprint to recycle than acquiring the original raw product is. There are some materials that it's just not worth to recycle, most of the time; plastic is definitely on that side for now, like it or not.
agumonkey 5y ago
an entropy tax ?
asimpletune 5y ago
> tax companies for resources consumed I feel like so much could be fixed by just making things cost their true price.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  What _is_ the true price of a resource though? You have to ration it out for a certain length of time, but what is the end date? Do we ensure we have supply for 100 years? 1000? I'm not trying to shit on the idea because I think we genuinely need to do something but I can't come up with any rational way to calculate the true cost of limited resources.
  - asimpletune 5y ago
    I think that's the real question. How much does it cost to add a bunch of packaging that serves no purpose other than to sell the item? I have no idea. At the same, I don't think doing nothing at all a good alternative. If anything I don't even think this is the biggest obstacle. That's probably the fact that literally no country in the world wants to volunteer to put themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      > I think that's the real question. How much does it cost to add a bunch of packaging that serves no purpose other than to sell the item? I have no idea. I think that it has been established that the cost of packaging is smaller than the marginal increase in profits from greater sales (from the perspective of the manufacturers and retailers). In theory, an AR-heavy economy could displace packaging costs with AR facsimiles overlaid on generic (even standardized) packaging, but I don't think that would be a win, energy-wise.
      - Gigachad 5y ago
        At least the future is online sales which do not need fancy packaging. Although they do often involve an extra plastic shipping bag.
Gene_Parmesan 5y ago
There was a really interesting (and disheartening) story by NPR this year about recycling in the US: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-worth-it-anymore-people-on-the-front-lines-say-maybe-not https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-... One of the comments made was that consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. In reality, the system we have only works if there are companies that want to actually use the recycled materials. If there are none, it just gets landfilled. I bring this up because one of the things mentioned was Pringles cans. Everyone thinks they are recyclable. But the can is two sheets of cardboard glued over a thin sheet of aluminum. The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people. So the cans just get thrown out. In fact some people make arguments that recycling programs do more harm than good, because they allow consumers to alleviate their guilt about waste without actually helping the environment. The cynic may say that's intentional.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  > consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. Consumers were told that by the local authorities who put these recycling programs in place. They were not told that behind the scenes it all goes to the landfill anyway. If they knew the truth they might actually make more effort to reduce the amount of stuff they throw out and be more aware of wasteful packaging.
  - amatecha 5y ago
    I really see this as a problem further up the chain - why is wasteful packaging even on the shelves? Why is there so much crap to throw out? Why was it legal to wrap a product in another 25% of its weight in useless, non-recyclable packaging? I'm not sure why I as an individual am forced to bear the brunt of colossally wasteful pipelines and processes that I had no say in. I can do a bit and reuse bags, buy stuff with minimal packaging (or avoid buying new stuff etc.), but broadly, I have no choice most of the time.
vidarh 5y ago
It's not perfect, but Norway has a tax on drinks containers that is set up so that the starting point is a tax on drinks containers. However any drinks containers you recycle is offset against the tax. Then there's a government endorsed recycling scheme that handles all but the collection for you, but requires that you participate in collecting containers irrespective of whether you sold them or not. So the default assumption is that if you do your job, the tax is more of a deposit. If you don't do your job, you, or rather your customers are still paying, and your customers can drive down the cost of your competitors by helping increase their tax offset if you make it a hassle to return things at yours. By creating the presumption that you ought to be able to collect and recycle most of the recyclable products you sell (return rate for cans and bottles is well over 90%), the tax/deposit can be set fairly high. High enough and you create secondary businesses taking the hassle of returns for those who can't be bothered (don't want to return your bottle in Norway? odds are someone who needs the money will fish it out of the trash to collect the deposit), and there's a strong incentive for businesses to take back anything they sell subject to such taxes/deposits and deliver them to whichever scheme is approved to offset against their tax bill. This sounds relatively close in principle to an implementation of what you're suggesting. with penalties etc. implemented basically by tallying up the tax per unit sold and then reducing the liability per unit recycled, so the penalty is simply the default if you fail to recycle.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That's a pretty good implementation of the concept.
- adamparsons 5y ago
  Handful of states and territories in Australia are doing this, and while I like the idea I haven't found a single person who has returned their bottles (including myself), instead just absorbed the additional cost into their expenses.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Then it's not high enough. The cost needs to be high enough to either get really high return rates and/or to cover the costs to society of undoing whatever damage is done by what is left. Note that a key part is also that the most convenient option offered to comply needs to be to participate in recycling. In Norway you hand bottles or cans in pretty much anywhere that sells them. Which means most people just bring them in next time they go to the grocery store. If you require people to bring them to special recycling locations you should expect return rates to plummet.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I really hope Lithium recycling isn't like plastic recycling: sell it to China and then end up screwed when they stop buying it. Plastic recycling has pretty much been a multi-decade lie. Let's not bone ourselves with Lithium. Who am I kidding, humans are great at boning themselves.

m0zg 5y ago
IIRC it's not "recycling" at all - they'd just bury the plastic in China instead of here. Much like we've "reduced emissions" by moving all industrial production to China which is almost completely un-regulated in terms of emissions until 2030. It's as though people think that atmospheric emissions are somehow confined to the country which emits them, rather than affect the entire planet.
not2b 5y ago
I don't see why it would be at all like plastic recycling: plastic "recycling" was never practical because there are too many kinds of plastic and making new plastic is so much cheaper. When the Chinese were buying it they were landfilling most of it in exchange for payments to take it off of our hands. On the other hand, aluminum recycling works very well.
- lrem 5y ago
  I'm slightly surprised by landfilling plastic. I hear it's pretty high calorie, up to the point of being energy-positive to burn it with filtering out the fumes. Is it just not enough to make this money-positive when accounting for handling?
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Some places do have energy and material recovery facilities next to their landfills that try to extract useful metal and useful energy from trash.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    I believe Japan does this, but there are dioxins all over the place there.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

We could also stop soldering batteries to things. It's a lot easier to recycle a battery that can be easily removed than one which is permanently attached to a circuit board.

jacquesm 5y ago
The majority of Lithium-Ion batteries are spot welded rather than soldered (soldering injects a lot of heat), which makes recycling battery packs a rather time consuming and annoying job. The best is probably to grind them up and then to create a sludge and do a sort by centrifuge or some other bulk method of processing the materials. A typical Lithium-Ion cell contains Aluminum, steel, possibly a protection circuit (fibreglass, electronics components), carbon, copper, an electrolyte with lithium in solution and quite probably other elements besides.

agumonkey 5y ago

Are there places (online, or else), journals, channels about a more recycling minded society ? both at the average joe but also at the industrial/technological level ?

teamonkey 5y ago
Not exactly what you’re after, but https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/

gotstad 5y ago

Adding to this, we should view raw materials used in production as something we "borrow" from the earth that must be returned. And the cost of returning them - through disassembly and recycling - should be reflected in the price of the final product. Right-to-repair friendly products would thus get an immediate advantage owing to their ease of disassembly.

Osiris 5y ago
This. I've been thinking about this for a while. In economics we talk about externalities, or costs tht are burdened by society but not the producer, making prices artificially low. I would love to see some mechanism in place to make sure that firms bare the cost of externalities. In this case, maybe firms are required to fund the cost of recycling their products which would incentive them to reduce the cost of recycling. Yes the cost of products will go up, but in a direct relationship to removing the cost to society and making sure products are properly priced. I'm purposefully simplifying this because the actual methodology to make this happen is incredibly complicated.
- jimmySixDOF 5y ago
  >Yes the cost of products will go up If someone told me all this $3T extra spending in the US was to offset the costs of producing a more Circular Economy then I'd agree it would be a future generation's money well spent for good reasons.

baybal2 5y ago

> "The immediate benefit of switching from a liquid to solid electrolyte is that the energy density of the battery can increase. This is because instead of requiring large separators between the liquid cells, solid state batteries only require very thin barriers to prevent a short circuit." This is BS. Modern separators are microns thin.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mc32 5y ago

I believe that the auto industry had an aim for “green manufacturing” by 2000. The idea was to build cars such that a car could be taken apart as easily as it was put together on the assembly line (no crushing or inceneration, in other words), this would enable easy recapturing of recyclable components. But apparently this was more a pipe dream than reality as far as I can tell.

jacquesm 5y ago
The situation has definitely improved since the 80's, but there is a long, long way to go to reach the original goal.
- collegeburner 5y ago
  Seems like cars are much less reparable than those from the 80s which are then worse than 60s. Electronics are part of this, but so is making cars lighter, more integrated, more fuel efficient. Old cars it is e.g much easier to do a tranny rebuild, new ones they are too damn sensitive and its much harder, and this extends to doing basically any repair. If larger laptops that are easier to repair are good for consumers you'd think so would cars like that, but no, fuel efficiency must trump all.
  - mc32 5y ago
    There are car mfgs where you have to maintain pretty strict voltages as you reprogram modules else they will brick themselves. They want to prevent Garage Joe or Jane from fixing his or her own car and instead have them go to the dealership and prevents owners from using used parts -so less "green".