5 ms·

I got mixed feelings about this. Food waste is valuable as compost and can be put back into the carbon cycle, and I think that is far more valuable than graphen

• betwixthewires 5y ago
  There's an easy way to put plastic back into the carbon cycle: burn it.
  • trainsarebetter 5y ago
    Gasification + fractional distillation tech I think are really under utilized. In theory it’s a great way to reduce this non ecological material into fuel, in return into something that is ecologically compatible. plastic is just fuckd
    • betwixthewires 5y ago
      CO2 is ecologically compatible. That's basically what long chain polymers reduce to if burned efficiently. And you can get energy out of them by burning them.
      • trainsarebetter 5y ago
        Yes that’s the point. gasification turns them into functional fuel’s. combusting them produces much “cleaner” gases than what burning plastic directly would produce.
      • funcDropShadow 5y ago
        > CO2 is ecologically compatible. Yes, but it just kills the climate.
        • trainsarebetter 5y ago
          Hmm not so straightforward. it’s very necessary for all forums of plant life. its just a matter of to much in the atmosphere is not a good thing. The current climate issue movement fails to address the ecological problems at hand. It’s all about co2 levels and not about healthy ecosystems and integrating back into nature. Plastic waste is really fucking up out planet.
  • hedora 5y ago
    Even better, bury it. It came from the ground, after all. Design the landfill to resist leaching and decomposition.
    • betwixthewires 5y ago
      Well I made the comment to point out, with the climate change discussion and all, that the big point is we don't want this stuff entering the carbon cycle. If it's good for this stuff to enter the carbon cycle, then climate change due to CO2 isn't a problem, burn it. If it is a problem, then it should be sequestered from the carbon cycle, like the stuff that came from the ground was a billion years ago, and some complex way of basically burning it is counterproductive.
• janj 5y ago
  Food waste ending up in the landfill is bad, produces large amounts of methane. I imagine there will always be streams of food waste that need to be diverted out of the landfill. In CA you're no longer allowed to throw food waste in the trash bin, it must be composted. I don't think that option is available everywhere. Having a variety of options should help divert food from ending up in a landfill.
  • hosh 5y ago
    The key is onsite composting and having it go back to onsite gardens. Failing that, a neighborhood composting which goes back to neighborhood gardens. The idea is to close the carbon cycle to the local area. This has the additional benefit of being able to grow food that are bred to be nutritious rather than bred to be transportable, mitigating overharvesting (when producers and consumers are separated by enough distance). Usually though, what we have in the US is that foodwaste goes to landfills (bad), and then lawns are grown with fertilizers (instead of compost). That's a much larger carbon cycle that ends up depleting the land in multiple ways. Let's not even get to how wasteful we get with water management -- pumping water, purifying them to drinking water standards, and then watering lawns with them.
  • hanniabu 5y ago
    > In CA you're no longer allowed to throw food waste in the trash bin, it must be composted How strictly is that enforced? And is it applied without exceptions? For example I compost but if I have something oily I'm going to compost it because oily soil isn't great.
    • hosh 5y ago
      Ah. So organisms such as oyster mushrooms can eat oil in contaminated soil and bring it back into something that plants can grow on. It also depends on how you are composting. The main problem with composting oily food is that the oil goes rancid. There are solutions for that. Black Soldier Flies Larvae can eat that stuff, and are symbiotic to human activity. (They stay in one place, drive out the other species of flies, and don't go after humans). If you have a red earthworm composting bin, you'd feed the BSFL stuff that you don't want to feed the worms. (You'd feed the worms the best stuff and give the rest to the BSFL). Industrial composters will just throw them all in big piles and they will eventually compost. Some might implement ideas from Paul Stamets and cultivate fungi on the heaps to help it break down faster.
• Retric 5y ago
  Climate change is all about excess carbon, it ultimately doesn’t matter where it’s coming from.
• bb123 5y ago
  I’m not sure I understand why we would want to put things back into the carbon cycle? Isn’t the problem that we have to much gaseous carbon out there at the moment? Wouldn’t it be better to sequester the excess carbon in some way?
  • hosh 5y ago
    Most of what you hear about sequestering carbon are too simplistic of strategies and models, and usually do not take into the account the bio-availability of carbon. Carbon that is eaten and used by plants, sequestered in soil are bio-available in the ecosystem, and if designed well, then there can be many kinds of yields useful for human. Healthy soil -- not dirt! -- with living organisms holding it, has a dramatic effect on the microclimate of the area, and helps regulate the microclimate across the solar cycle. When you have bare dirt, and no plants or anything living there, then the area gains more temperature variability. Because of the way we farm in the modern world, we leave a lot of bare dirt around. Thermal satallites show a rise in temperature every year during the planting and harvesting seasons. The idea of reducing carbon emissions from industrial processes and cars will not reduce the climate extremes we are seeing. Having better land management, tightening up carbon and water cycles in microclimates helps a lot more, and have many beneficial side-effects (such as reducing weath inequality gaps, having stronger more cohesive communities) But an example of what I am talking about. The film is focused more on better water management, but it's integrated with bringing fertility back to a wasteland. The water harvesting strutures discussed in the video are dug in a way that also accumulates organic matter so that topsoil can rebuild on what is otherwise bedrock. https://youtu.be/KtHuIlfyJao https://youtu.be/KtHuIlfyJao
• giantg2 5y ago
  "Food waste is valuable as compost and can be put back into the carbon cycle, and I think that is far more valuable than graphene in terms of ecology, rather than the market." This was my first thought. I agree. The minerals and nutrients are much more valuable as fertilizer. I think we rely too heavily on synthetic fertilizer and fail to realize how much arable land we throw away each year (by not reintroducing the waste to the lands).
• TheDudeMan 5y ago
  There is no chance that any significant portion of food waste is going to be redirected to graphene production. Think of the logistics.
• syntheweave 5y ago
  If graphene is cheap by either source, there's a net benefit regardless. When tech adds flexibility, we converge on more efficient uses overall because we don't have to push them through a bottleneck. And graphene manufacturing is believed to reduce our footprint in other areas by being "stronger and lighter" per unit: less used, less transported, less wasted. And if waste food becomes a major resource, that acts as a direct encouragement to subsidize food overproduction, which is not really a bad thing(nobody wants their nation to starve in a bad season).
• pabs3 5y ago
  We definitely do not want to put plastic back into the carbon cycle. It was created from oil that was outside the carbon cycle for millions of years, bringing that back into the carbon cycle created the climate change situation we are in. Bringing more of that back into the carbon cycle via plastic just makes things worse. We want existing plastic (and carbon in the air etc) taken permanently out of the carbon cycle somehow.
  • hosh 5y ago
    I definitely want to put the plastic into the carbon cycle, it is just that the carbon cycle I have in mind is not the same as the carbon cycle people are used to thinking. There's a carbon cycle of plants -> oil -> plastics -> burn in air -> plants -> oil ... And that cycle takes a long time. But the carbon cycle I am thinking of is one that makes the carbon in the plastics bio-available to plants directly. That means greater fertility, greater food abundance, food sovereignty, better land management. Trying to stuff the carbon from plastics back into rock does not give us greater fertility, food abundance or food sovereignty. If anything, it will increase the wealth inequality gap, and makes it harder to feed everyone. We're not quite there yet. The key is being able to safely composting plastics, and that means finding or breeding microorganisms that are capable of eating it. What we would have to give up are the properties of plastic that our modern society is addicted to ... something that _doesn't_ biodegrade, durable and cheap enough to be used ubiquitously.
    • pabs3 5y ago
      That is a good point, there are a lot of parallels between our current plastic situation and the world before the invention of lignin/cellulose breakdown mechanisms by fungi. However, I still think that in the short term, stopping the oil/gas/plastic carbon cycle and finding ways to reverse it, to reduce climate change is much more important for the planet and humanity. In addition, we need to think about stabilising the human population (encouraging birth control etc) both for climate change and ecological/species survival reasons. Once we have solved/stablised/reversed Earth's ecological problems then maybe we can think about integrating plastics back into the shorter carbon cycle safely.