There’s an old saying in the north of the UK – “where there’s muck, there’s brass”. So here’s a modern Japanese re-spin on it: where there’s sewage, there’s gold.
The sewage in question is from Nagano Prefecture’s Suwa Basin, a region where a lot of machining factories and metal-plating outfits are located, and apparently the resulting sludge has a higher concentration of gold than high-grade ore. Ker-ching!
It’s no secret that a lot of the West’s waste ends up in China and other far eastern countries. What you may not have realised is that a significant number of people make a living from sorting, reclaiming and reselling that waste; used plastics to packing chip factories, for example.
Or rather, they used to make a living doing it; now, scrap trading in China has fallen at the hands of the global economic slump:
Minter says the predicament is typical of the trade. “People would borrow money from relatives and buy a container of scrap and then throw all that money back in and reinvest it. Great if it goes up – but the moment it starts slipping, especially if it’s slipping 20-30%, you’re finished,” he said.
Even if you’re so hard-hearted as to think that the economic fate of Chinese scrap workers is no big deal to you, the consequences of this are going to be felt in your world too: China used to import scrap and waste from countries like the US and the UK. Now there’s no one who can make a meagre living by cleaning up behind us, we’re going to have to start doing it ourselves. [image by Paul Goyette]
One of the less-feted stars of this year’s CES was the POLLI-Brick, an example of how recycling might be used to make something useful. The POLLI-Brick is an oddly-shaped plastic building block which…
… features a unique interlocking cylindrical shape and […] is created from around four recycled PET plastic bottles. The shape incorporates a great deal of air; thereby providing the thermal and sound insulation.
Besides their potential use as architectural components, they can be fitted with LED lamps in their cavities to provide mood lighting, or be used as plant pots. All good stuff, for sure – I’m all for reusing stuff we usually throw away -but one can’t help but feel that they’re going to look rather unfashionable rather fast, like last season’s rave club decor. Few things age as badly (and obviously) as architecture. [image borrowed from linked GizMag article]
And while we’re on the subject of recycling… oil prices may be low again at the moment, but they’re unlikely to stay that way forever. The prudent person plans ahead… so maybe you’d be interested in step-by-step instructions for converting your Honda Accord to run on organic trash, a bit like the Mr Fusion unit on the Back to the Future Dolorian? [via MetaFilter]
When you make that long trip to the planetary system of Fomalhaut, what are you going to drink? New York Times reporter and all-around brave person John Schwartz reports:
How does distilled urine and sweat taste? Not bad, actually…
Your intrepid reporter opened one of the bottles of “Purified Recycled Water” that Mr. [Robert] Bagdigian [leader of the project to recycle stuff on the International Space Station] brought with him. The wryly worded label was a little intimidating: “We use only the finest ingredients! Urine, Perspiration, Food Vapors, Bath Water, Simulated Animal Waste, and a touch of Iodine. No Carbs or Calories Added.”
With that as my verbal drum roll, I took a sip. Aside from a slight tang of iodine, it tasted like, well, water. I’ve had tap water that tasted much more like things I don’t want to think about.
The $250 million water recovery system is on its way to the station, “preparing our home in space for a larger international family,” as NASA’s spokesperson couches it. The system will recycle about 90 percent of the water used aboard the station and could pay for itself in a couple of years. Astronauts don’t seem worried; one of the first customers for the system, Sandra H. Magnus, says: “We drink recycled water every day, on a little bit longer time scale.”
[Apparently my water is OK for space by tom.glanz]
Computer hardware can be a real bitch to recycle, as attested by massive landfills in developing nations and closer to home. Someone in an organisation called EPCglobal has evidently been paying attention to Bruce Sterling, because their plan to tag all new-built computer components with unique RFID chips containing data about how, where and when they were made sounds pretty similar to Sterling’s “spimes”. [image by southernpixel]
Now, if we could just give them GPS devices so they could navigate themselves back to their point of manufacture…