The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

Re:The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End by diggernet on Saturday January 12, 2019 @05:06PM (#18893538)

I can't wait for the glorious era of fusion-powered recycling. Dump literally anything in the bin. It all gets vaporized (thanks to plentiful, cheap energy), and is centrifuge-sorted into its constituent atoms.

Out of curiosity... Just how delusional am I?

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Re:The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End by ggm on Saturday January 12, 2019 @05:10PM (#18893555)

High heat is one of the ways PCBs are reprocessed to constituents. Given the energy cost to make long chain molecules it seems a shame to spend energy breaking them. I think it might be better to not make as much in the first place and make kinds which are thermo-mouldable to repurpose

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Re:The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End by PinkMilkshake on Sunday January 13, 2019 @01:33AM (#18895447)

I believe you are referring to a fusion torch!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_torch

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Re:The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End by ben_w on Saturday January 12, 2019 @06:01PM (#18893816)

It would work, but we can do much better than brute force. What you’re describing is how I’d turn the Moon and Mercury into a Dyson swarm (as the mineral extraction part of a clanking replicator), but I suspect that even in that example someone who only just managed a chemistry BSc could do vastly better than anything I can imagine.

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