Oh, but wait this was the topic of the book The Skeptical Environmentalist which points out that recycling is the only industry in the world where is it ok to pull a loss because after all we are saving the planet. But if you really look at legislation in cities and town centered around recycling isn’t this more like a tax then a levy? Because after all you are working for free to sort and clean all the products you have already paid for and then you pay into fuel and transportation to willing do something that an industry would do if there was one. And still once the plastics are reground and pellitized they can’t be sold as virgin polymer because they can’t make virgin products again because of public out cry. There are a few products that can be made that take higher concentrations of recycled polymers but for the most part anything that is colored is where they end up.

Now something i do not agree with which I over heard at my last attendance to the recycling center was a lady being told that if they by any chance mixed up the plastics in the bin that it would screw up the recycling process. Well, I ran plastics for 21 years. Setup extrusion lines, ran shifts and pretty much was involved in plastics ground up and any time we ever got cross contamination it did not thing more then plugged the screens. Which I might add happens with all the dirt that is sucked up because of the static plastics give off. Often with profile lines there are continuous screening systems that pull anything foreign out of the flow of plastic anyway. Cross contamination just isn’t a big deal.

Personally, i think that the public should look into how plastics are handled and how cost effective recycled plastics are. I doubt the trading system has changed much in the last 10 years, it use to be you took a really big gamble when you bought recycled polymer. You never knew if the product in the boxes had been recycled more then 4 times and would make nothing but garbage, or someone had a couple of pails of stones in the bottom of the box. Often you never got to sample the boxes prior to buying it and in my experience you might have 1500 pounds of good product and then 1500 pounds of scrap. Regrind that would not run got put into products that where expendable, pool noodles are one of those expendable products which often end up in the land fill anyway.

I would encourage everyone to check out Bjorn Lomborg

But even as the oil film grows in the gulf there is one other oil spill that most probably never denote as being a spill at all. And yet every day thousands of people set out to clean it up and assure that reclamation of the oil is in the highest regard. I am talking about the Fort McMurray oil sands projects. Oil has bubbled up in the sands and requires cleaning, and essentially that is the process adopted to separate the sand from the oil. Trucks are laded with dirty sand, and taken to a giant washing machine where the oil is washed out and the sand is returned to the pit. Certainly a much safer and more friendly alternative to processing oil.

But more so I think with the spill in the Gulf that legislation will come into play after the damage has been tallied to force drilling of this kind to stop. I think pressures will be such that more incentives will be placed on alternative fuels, and the primary oil suppler to the US will be just over the boarder to the north. Maybe this is a risky statement but in terms of safe viable solutions to energy, the oil sands demonstrates that it can compete and that the process is much safer than drilling holes into high pressure deposits. I think that much like the re-assessment of safety concerns on the part of Nasa after Challenger and Columbia so will such deliberations take affect within the US oil industry. And less dangerous means will come to light as being favorable. Now granted fort Mc is not without it’s challenges, there are still implications to address with respect to the tailings ponds and reclamation of water for the process. But I believe once oil sands becomes the only option on the table these concerns will be worked out quickly.

May become a the world's sacrificial cow

Insatiable Appetite

I find it somewhat strange that the various oil companies out there never thought this might happen. But this crime is bigger, companies like BP are just figure heads of the real criminals. Every person that drives, and consumes the products that this sticky fluid is made into. We as a society have become so connected to oil that the world will become a sacrificial cow in order to locate it all.

There are so many greener initiative to work on and funnel money into that would greatly eliminate the need for oil. But like this article suggests, this well could go uncapped until August, at which time the relief well will be in place. This in my opinion should be a wake up call to the planet that their actions have to stop

I often wonder, where are all the green jobs that are to be present now. But then judging by the oil influence green jobs can’t get a foot hold, and I guess this is a matter of public discussion. The public is so disconnected from tragedies like this oil leak that they continue to drive day in and day out. But I think it is more then that, those people are hinged to jobs that leave them saddled to servitude, so even if they wanted to stop and enjoy life they couldn’t.

Many people blame big oil for control and domination of the market place, but take little time to really understand the market themselves. Crying like whinny children expecting their next meal they complain, but every couple of days venturing down to the pumps to drain yet another couple of liters into their vehicles. You know it isn’t big oil that sets the price it is customer demand in relation to environmental sanctions and supply. Very much of the oil industry is set around the thoughts and feelings of the public, when there is unrest and turmoil in a country that contributes oil then feathers get ruffled and the cost of oil goes up. So just like we all are directly responsible for the food we eat, the exercises we adhere to and the entertainment we participate in we are connected at the hip to the cost of fuel.

Here I am about 20 years after his death and out of work, and recounting all that he taught me as I watch builders in the area wacking wood together. I watch as workmanship has given way to cost constraints and more so to safety of the builder.

During my time taking Engineering I recall an instructor telling us, the eager young students that you automated tasks that:

1. Where a danger to the operator and others
2. Repetitive tasks that would potentially reduce quality or injure the operator
3. Tasks that it was hard to find employees for.

So here I look at construction and for the most part other than the advent of air tools the various parts to building a house has been unchanged since the very first house was built. A carpenter still carries a hammer, still struggles with heights, cold, dust and the hazards associated with them. Mind you now a carpenter might only build on portion of a house rather than the whole house. But still with the injuries associated with the blunt trauma of hammering or the inhalation of dust that never break down. The occupation is still very hazardous and not much has been done in the industry to automate things in order to assist the carpenter.

Say for example you built a system that poured concrete much like how curbing is poured on a street. But instead of having a crew of guys come in and assemble forms to the basement specifications, then have concrete guys come in and pour those forms full. Why not have a combined system that used a bit more advanced concrete that would form and fill at the same time, much the way tunnels are made with shot-crete or how slip forms are used in making Dams and Bridges. The big benefit of this is only one crew arrives, pours and there is no forms if the concrete is stiff enough and bound with enough fillers to hold it’s shape. Also, you wouldn’t have voids like in the instance of the house next door. And you could be entirely more creative in what you built for your foundation. Even your footing could be slip poured with a curb laying device attached to the concrete pump. Lay out your drainage tile, and pour right over top of them with the curb former.

There are so many things that could be done to automate home building, assure exceptional quality and reduce injury. But I have yet to locate anyone willing to entertain my ideas and step forward to make them happen.

I was researching the current kinds of mowers found in the marketplace and I stumbled across a very informative Magazine on robotics.

Some day soon

Through out my career I have worked for a number of companies that manufactured component parts used within housing construction. I have worked within a variety of roles for these organizations and in dealing with the contractors that used these components I have managed to formulate a need that should be looked at in terms of automating. When a house is scheduled for construction the contractor lines up various sub trades to complete these parts and hopefully complete the house on time and under budget. But as money becomes a factor certain roles are harder and harder to locate sub contractors for. Some of the roles i know of personally are:

• Insulating after the initially rough in
• Painting
• applying flooring/screwing down flooring
• Landscaping
• Concrete work

So within the world of automation and manufacturing you always try to automate tasks that are hard to employee people to do, that are repetitive, or that are hazardous. And thus i think that automation and robotics should be tasked into these areas to eliminate them as it is increasingly hard to find employees to do them for a reasonable wage.

So my idea would be to build a robotic system that would insulate using spray in insulation, to be escorted into a house, be feed foam in installation and have it map each room, foam the wall cavities full and move to the next room. This would allow a handler to just have basic knowledge and to move the unit from site to site. All the intelligence would be built into the robotic system. This is should be entirly possible considering industrial manufacturing robotic systems have been doing this for years. This system could be just a smaller robotic arm system with a mapping system.

In terms of landscaping I believe that the scrapper or caterpillar could tirelessly move materials all day and night, having mapping systems and GPS location the system could be completely integrated into a entirely new power unit. Not having an operators cab the scrappers/caterpillars could be built to take advantage of torque and blade placement to pull the most from the vehicle. essentially the robotic system would be like a larger Roomba that would have a map encoded in it’s software that it would have to culture to a specific level. This posses some incredible benefits as it could work without restrictions of sight and fatigue, things that greatly inflate the costs of roads, landscaping, and construction these days.

I had read recently, that in Fort MacMurry they where working on robotizing mining trucks to be able to tirelessly haul oil sand from the pit to the watering centrifuge and clean sand back to the pit. Apparently, the hauling of these materials and the long hours of mundane, repetitive tasks result in a great many accidents along the pit roads and highways. i had read that they have had to encourage the drivers to drive on the left hand side of the road just encase the trucks collide so that the operators would not be kills with the shear mass of the operators cabs hitting.

The way of the future

For a while now I have been doodling on an idea about building a automated mower. I know there are various iterations of mowers already on the market that will mow within a pre-defined circuit. But with the success of robotic vacuums it dawned on me that it would be possible to produce a mower that could plot it’s own path based on GPS mapping of the field or area it was to mow.

So I have been working on the mechanics and matrix that a mower wold have to have in order to handle an unfamiliar terrain and be able to down load a map of an area.

I was reading an article recently on how green friendly it was to stave off throwing plastics into a land fill and just how many plants and animals this action saved. But what I guess this person never looked at was how much carbon the act of recycling actually produces. I believe that recycling is something you do with plastics but having worked in that environment for so many years I think the media only really bought in on the fluffy parts of the recycling business and fell asleep to what it actually costs.

So lets follow the life cycle of your average plastic container, for our example we are going to use a classic styrene container. Probably a nice clear one, that contained a salad and was bought a a store with a nice paper label on it.

1. The consumer removed the label and puts it in the paper recycling bin, then washes out the plastic container and put it in the Styrene bin because it has a 6 in the triangle under it.
2. The consumer then takes a trip to the recycling depot which I might add results in them burning fossil fuels and adding to the carbon on the planet.
3. The container is put in with other containers like it which in turn are housed in a building that might require storage of those containers and thus also contributes to carbon.
4. The container then gets compressed and baled and placed on a truck. The act of compressing and baling it takes fuel and electricity which also contributes to carbon.
5. The truck transports that bale and others to a depot or even to the plastics recyclers which I might add takes fuel which in turn results in more carbon.
6. The recyclers has to remove the glue that is stuck to the containers that use to hold the label, if they do not this results in wastage of plastic and pressure problems when they re-melt the plastic and extrude it. So the containers have to be cleaned of the glue.
7. The containers then get chipped back up so they can be re-melted in the extruder and re-pelletized. All this taking large quanitieis of energy and thus more carbon.
8. the repelletizer then deposits the pellets into a bin which is either used in house if that company makes plastics products or is packaged up and shipped to a products manufacturer.
9. If the pellets are shipped to a products manufacturer a clear product can not accept a recycled ploymer into it without clouding the final product so it has to be tinted. This taking more energy to extrude as the melt is thicker.
10. The little triangle under a plastic signifies how many times a plastic can be recycled, but what it fails to tell a person is that the plastic can not be used at 100% in a new product but only in the case of Styrene at 30% or in some instances 40% with virgin resin. This is because as you use the recycled polymer more and more it losses it’s abllty to be elastic and ends up no longer being usable.
11. So now that clear clam shell container went from being clear to now ending up in a tray that is black and only 30% of the orginal clear reprocessed container could be used in the new black tinted tray which I might add still has to be packaged up again and trucked which takes Carbon.

So ultimately if you really look at recycling you might want to think about plastic containers a bit differently, your doing the world a dis-service by recycling them because your contributing almost 3 times to the carbon bank. Yes, the plastic is out of land fill but from a capitlizum point of view when you bring back a product to be recycled you do not see a dime for that return but the people that drop off the bales get paid for that material. Recycled plastics are often bought and sold on their own market and the consumer through their grace brings these products back free for the stores and agencies to sell. Which in turn pumps more Green house gases into the environment throgh the processing of them.

My idea would be to build a home repellitizing unit for your plastics that you can bin your own recyclables and sell. Because a lot of the carbon costs are around trucking around air spaces in bales.

When thinking about saving the planet you might want think about the planet and do your due dilligence.