5 ms·
This is what happens to essentially all materials. Metals, Plastics, Oil, Stone, Sand, Concrete all come from things that have been standing mostly still for mi
by crubier 2y ago
This is what happens to essentially all materials. Metals, Plastics, Oil, Stone, Sand, Concrete all come from things that have been standing mostly still for millions of years before we extracted their components
- cogman10 2y agoSome materials are more replaceable than others. A pine wood fixture can be regrown relatively quickly. Even something like oak based furniture can be replaced in a few hundred years. Heck, even plastic is pretty replaceable as reducing bio-material into plastic isn't unheard of. (The first plastics were made out of casein from milk).
- ametrau 2y agoYou can make plastic from air and light.
- berkes 2y agoHow?
- feoren 2y agoUse lots of photovoltaic power (light) to sequester CO2 and H2O and jam it together into more complex carbon compounds? If trees can do it, we can at least approximate it (trees come from the air, not the ground).
- cogman10 2y agoA bio method will likely be a lot cheaper. Algae plastic would be three route to look at as you can grow a ton of algae very quickly. A little GMO and you could optimize it for CO2 sequestration.
- concordDance 2y agoAbsurdly expensive though.
- cogman10 2y agoDepends on how literal/direct you are being. Algae plastic isn't terribly expensive to produce.
- krick 2y agoI get anxiety when I see helium balloons.
- hyperbovine 2y agoWith relatively few exceptions, everything you ever owned or interacted with more than x years ago is rotting in some landfill.
- berkes 2y agoDepends on how big you make x.
- dredmorbius 2y agoMost iron (and steel) comes from iron ore formations which are at least 1 billion, and up to 3 billion years old: banded iron formations (BIFs). The oldest of those are literally legacies of the first major burst of biological activity on Earth, which released oxygen into the atmosphere, which for most of a billion of years or so resulted in reducing unoxidized minerals, particularly iron, in the Great Rusting.