Re:Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined
by kragen on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @12:08AM
(#28926648)
The resulting sludge is in many cases much richer in valuable (but dangerous) heavy metals than the ores we mine the heavy metals from, as well as a few lighter elements like lithium. Maybe the way to handle this is to split it up into one-tonne or ten-tonne chunks, seal each one in a few millimeters of polypropylene, and bury them in carefully recorded secret locations: in abandoned underground mines, quarries, wilderness areas, on the sea floor. Then, you can sell the coordinates of these secret locations to would-be miners—maybe not in 02021 but in 02061 or 02121. Seeking investors with long time horizons!
More realistically, there isn't really any risk of running out of landfill space for product packaging at anything similar to current consumption levels. If a person ate a 50-gram can of Pringles and a 30-gram bottle of Coke every day, they'd have 29 kg of packaging at the end of the year, or 29 liters, which compact down to a 40-cm-diameter sphere.
I used to periodically visit an ecovillage that handled their (much smaller than normal) packaging waste in this way: they would tamp it into two-liter Coke bottles with a piece of rebar as a tamper, and when the bottle was full, they would cap it, plaster it over with adobe, and use it as a construction brick. A 6 m × 18 m house with 300-mm-thick walls 3 m tall contains 43 m³ of wall volume which can be mostly filled with this kind of stuff: 150 person-junk-food-years of packaging.
8 billion people doing this would produce 23 million cubic meters of packaging per year, which sounds like a lot, but it's an 800-meter-diameter sphere. Lake Superior is 12000000 million cubic meters, so it would take those 8 billion people half a million years to fill it up with this packaging, if carefully weighted to keep it from floating, of course.
So, I don't think recycling packaging is a particularly bad problem. If by "in the longer term" you mean over the next hundred million years, I do agree that we'll need to solve it. But I don't think it's a particularly difficult problem at that timescale. For the next few million years, we have plenty of space to just store the stuff until recycling it is profitable.
More realistically, there isn't really any risk of running out of landfill space for product packaging at anything similar to current consumption levels. If a person ate a 50-gram can of Pringles and a 30-gram bottle of Coke every day, they'd have 29 kg of packaging at the end of the year, or 29 liters, which compact down to a 40-cm-diameter sphere.
I used to periodically visit an ecovillage that handled their (much smaller than normal) packaging waste in this way: they would tamp it into two-liter Coke bottles with a piece of rebar as a tamper, and when the bottle was full, they would cap it, plaster it over with adobe, and use it as a construction brick. A 6 m × 18 m house with 300-mm-thick walls 3 m tall contains 43 m³ of wall volume which can be mostly filled with this kind of stuff: 150 person-junk-food-years of packaging.
8 billion people doing this would produce 23 million cubic meters of packaging per year, which sounds like a lot, but it's an 800-meter-diameter sphere. Lake Superior is 12000000 million cubic meters, so it would take those 8 billion people half a million years to fill it up with this packaging, if carefully weighted to keep it from floating, of course.
So, I don't think recycling packaging is a particularly bad problem. If by "in the longer term" you mean over the next hundred million years, I do agree that we'll need to solve it. But I don't think it's a particularly difficult problem at that timescale. For the next few million years, we have plenty of space to just store the stuff until recycling it is profitable.