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How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle, In 6 Gifs
- simonsarris 13y agoVery neat. I love that the first one is named gross.gif. Wait a minute, one of them is named opticalsorter3.gif? Why that means... Yes! Some bonus gifs for us! http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm-recycling/opticalsorter.gif http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm-recycling/optica... http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm-recycling/opticalsorter2.gif http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm-recycling/optica... When I was a kid finding gems like that online always made me feel really clever.
- X-Istence 13y agoOff-topic, but related to your post. When I found out hp.com had a website at www2.hp.com I thought I had discovered the second world wide web, and I tried to go to every single other domain I knew and add www2 in front in hopes of finding out more about this second world wide web. Ah to be young again.
- ComputerGuru 13y agoFor me, it was www3 on the USPTO website back in the early 90s. It seems like the site hasn't changed since then.
- zaptheimpaler 13y ago>>When I was a kid finding gems like that online always made me feel really clever If you haven't already, you should try notpr0n - http://notpron.org/notpron/ http://notpron.org/notpron/ Its an online riddle, and a large part of it is finding those kinds of gems to figure out what to do next. I highly recommend it!
- sneak 13y agoweev tried this technique once.
- vinhboy 13y agoslow clap...
- midas 13y agoMost people aren't aware that the difference in energy efficiency between glass and aluminum recycling is enormous. Here are some choice quotes from National Geographic... "each 10 percent of cullet in the mix reduces the energy required to make new [glass] containers by 2 to 3 percent" At 70% cullet (the max), that's only 14-21% in energy savings for glass. "creating an aluminum can out of recycled materials requires only 5 percent as much energy as creating a brand new can from bauxite ore" That's 95% energy savings for aluminum. Big difference! Source: http://greenliving.nationalgeographic.com/energy-recycle-glass-bottles-vs-aluminum-cans-vs-plastic-2376.html http://greenliving.nationalgeographic.com/energy-recycle-gla...
- Dylan16807 13y agoThat's because glass doesn't take a whole lot of energy in the first place. And it's not like the primary goal of recycling is energy saving.
- samatman 13y agoRather, it is because electrolytic smelting of bauxite is enormously energy intensive, compared to the melting of sand, glass, or aluminum.
- bcoates 13y agoFor glass and aluminum, energy saving is the whole game for recycling. If energy were free there'd be no recycling of either.
- ars 13y ago> And it's not like the primary goal of recycling is energy saving. Really? And what is the primary goal of recycling glass then? Fair notice: if you say conservation I'm going to laugh at you.
- ComputerGuru 13y agoI would have said reduction of garbage/landfill.
- lifeformed 13y agoI like the use of gifs, although it loads really poorly on my computer. Half of them don't animate, and the other ones stutter. It feels really laggy scrolling through the page. I wish browsers could handle animated gifs better, and (from an end user perspective) make them essentially work like an embedded Vine.
- anigbrowl 13y agoI hate it. It's a lazy way to avoid editing a short video and doing some narration. This is what you get when you have cameras that record quality video on the cheap but people who can't be bothered to learn any of the technique to use them effectively.
- rallison 13y agoI find it much more likely they went this route for the style. The photographer for these photos is Lam Thuy Vo [1] and based on her gallery, she appears to shoot with a 5D Mark II. She is obviously comfortable with a high quality camera. [1] http://lamivo.com/index.html http://lamivo.com/index.html
- anigbrowl 13y agoI'm fine with the shooting - you know it's good because of the framing, exposure, and other factors. It's the laziness of throwing 6 animated gifs on the same page that I find deplorable. Even a slideshow with text would have been an improvement. To me this is like offering someone 6 spoonfuls of different food and saying it's equivalent to a meal. There's an entire visual grammar of sequential image presentation that's getting thrown away for the sake of novelty, so someone at npr.org can feel hip for knowing what a gif is. Let anyone get the wrong idea, I am a huge fan of Vine and think it occupies a happy medium between photo and longer-form video. But you won't make it better by stacking them in big piles, any more than Watching a bank of TVs tuned to multiple channels improves your information intake.
- gdubs 13y agoGifs are a horrible format for video, but yet people love them for their simplicity. Vine is smartly capitalizing on this. Definitely think this was a stylistic choice here -- a narrated video is a completely different experience.
- ajtaylor 13y agoThe gifs are some of the best ones I've ever seen. They are almost perfectly seamless!
- trhaynes 13y agoSounds like you would enjoy cinemagraphs. For example: http://annstreetstudio.com/category/cinemagraphs/ http://annstreetstudio.com/category/cinemagraphs/
- akent 13y agoThanks for the link. Particularly interesting is the Q&A post where they discuss HTML5 vs GIF http://annstreetstudio.com/2011/12/22/the-other-half/ http://annstreetstudio.com/2011/12/22/the-other-half/
- ajtaylor 13y agoThank you for the link. I'm going to have fun looking back through all their posts.
- stephen 13y agoIt astounds me that the costs of these plants (plus the costs of getting the raw/recycled material there) can be amortized to some fraction of the $2 we pay for a bottled beverage.
- lostlogin 13y agoA few things a like that. I get 1L bottles of a tomato pasta sauce I like. It costs about US $2. It tastes good and has a custom bottle for the brand. How do they do it? I couldn't grow the ingredients from seed for that price as the seeds alone would exceed that cost. Then making the sauce, the bottle, then shipping.
- kintamanimatt 13y agoYou're paying retail for the seeds, etc. They aren't.
- chii 13y agobut the point still stands - sure the seeds might've only cost you a few cents (or even, free if you know a nice farmer who'll give you some). But think about the time it takes to grow, and the amount of effort required to grow enough to make one jar of tomato sauce...
- kintamanimatt 13y agoEconomies of scale, short supply chains, and automation. It's not really all that surprising.
- justinator 13y agoHas anyone had the experience of being told to simply throw away a glass bottle - that it's essentially made of sand, and it's much more efficient just to make a new bottle from the raw material? That's happened to me, from someone working at a restaurant. I get the feeling form this (small) story, that that's not actually entirely true. What say you, HN?
- NovemberWest 13y agoRecycling is a good thing, the opinions of waiters (or what not) not withstanding. Maybe restaurant employees aren't the best source of info on the topic.
- ars 13y agoRecycling metal is a good thing. For everything else it's usually bad for the environment, and sometimes neutral. Rarely positive. Glass should just be tossed. Burning everything else (i.e. paper and plastic) for energy (with a good filter) is probably the best option.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- repiret 13y agoI live in a rural areal, and the local recycling center recently stopped accepting glass. Apparently the cost of transporting it to someone who has the facilities to recycle it outweighs the price the recycler will pay. For a time, the city picked up the difference, but they aren't doing that anymore. My point is that whether or not something is economic to recycle is at least in part dependent on where that thing is. I suppose it seems obvious when put that way; but I don't think its obvious at the outset.
- suby 13y agoI don't know if this is the case, but shouldn't a lot of the transportation costs be happening regardless? The distributor ships product to a store, and when they're done offloading the product, they take the recycled products from the store back to the distributor where they're headed regardless. You'd still have to transport it to a recycling center from the distributor, but I don't see why you can't build recycling centers next to distribution centers.
- tren 13y agoIf you like this you may be interested in a new waste disposal system being trialled in my city (Perth, Australia) - http://www.anaeco.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=82&Itemid=55 http://www.anaeco.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view.... It basically takes general household garbage diverting approximately 70-85% of it from landfill. Plastics, glass, metals and biodegradable organic matter are automatically separated out at different stages and the whole plant uses biogas generated from the organic matter to generate power (excess power is fed back into the grid).
- arvidj 13y ago> (We wanted to take a picture of the furnace, but they warned us that it was so hot that getting close to it could destroy our camera lens. Which makes sense, given that it was hot enough to melt glass.) In that case, wouldn't the furnace also be hot enough to melt the photographer?
- shabble 13y agoPeople working near are likely to be wearing suits something like [1]. I'm not sure if there are any fundamental constraints to putting a camera inside a similar shielded enclosure, but I imagine it could be possible that the camera lenses might focus the light sufficiently to damage the CCD. Then again, the bulk of energy is presumably in the IR, which isn't particularly well transmitted through glass (and hence, would be absorbed instead, maybe damaging it or any expensive coatings it has) [1] http://www.lakeland.com/h900.shtml http://www.lakeland.com/h900.shtml
- ygra 13y agoThis reminds me a lot of How it's made, except the video is in looping GIFs and the narration is in text form in between.
- joelthelion 13y agoAlmost no human interaction. The concept of a "job" for everyone is going to become obsolete very soon.
- chii 13y agoit just means that one person is capable of producing a lot more by designing smart machines, instead of manual labour. The engineering/thought going into the design is still a job. Imagine if the entire world didn't need manual labour - what would/could happen? Is it possible that all humans work on abstract things like designing stuff (programmgin/engineering/produce entertainment for others)?
- corford 13y agoI loved the last two gifs. That's an office! Makes the typical startup place look like an infantile playground :)
- KurtMueller 13y agoPlease play this youtube video while you browse this article. It enhances the effect. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9-7uLg-DZU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9-7uLg-DZU
- pikewood 13y agoIs there a reason other than aesthetics that glass needs to be sorted? Do the chemical colorants not work well together, or is the glass types incompatible with each other? Wouldn't multi-colored glass that looks obviously recycled be a product that would be attractive to "green-conscious" companies?