The comment intrigued me, and reminded me of a reference in Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson to landfill mining. At the time it made quite an impression on me. The idea of mining landfills, of these vast dumps of that must hold incredible value which is currently unattainable. It is an amazing idea, and you wonder if you could recover it.
Then you spend years in the industry and learn the many, many reasons for why you can't recover the value. Perhaps the reasons are sound, though a Fast Company article in 2006 suggests that the economics are beginning to change.
So lets go back to Green Mars and see what was written.
Before its acquisition, he [Art Randolph] had been the co-founder and technical director of a small company called Dumpmines, which was in the business of digging up and processing old landfills, recovering the valuable materials that had been thrown away in a more wasteful age.
and then
So when starting Dumpmines he had taken the technical directorship, and had done some good work on their Super-Rathjes, the giant robot vehicles that did the extraction and sorting at the landfills...
Robots digging out and sorting waste from landfills. Obviously not now, and maybe needs development in waste sorting technology to recover the most valuable components that then cover the cost of processing. The gold and so on that is in the waste.
But perhaps we are getting close. Perhaps if we look at landfills that occupy valuable land, we might manage to make it pay off. The gold might not be within the waste, but beneath it.
So thanks for the comment Ken, it reminded me of some inspirational memories.
Glad to have raised a inspirational memory.
ReplyDeleteSometime, reality can be stranger than fiction.
I learned electronics as a teen from rebuilding busted televisions scavenged from the local "landfill facility". At the time, I was impressed that the New Cockburn facility was constructed with a clay lining to decrease the plume of pollutants spreading through the water table, and how the site was built with buried pipes to harvest the methane in the future. There were oil and metal recycling points.. It made my mind buzz.
Fiction of the time was filled with nanotechnology, sparked by books such as " engines of creation" by drexler. But I was also reading older fiction. A short story "Waldo Inc" by Harry Harrison, told of fantastic remote robotic hands, from huge machines, to tiny precision devices that could be remotely controlled by someone far away "Waldos" providing technical skill to places where that skill was not locally available.
My dreams were filled with tiny robots that could be poured down those gas tubes to recover jewelry accidentally lost in the trash. such childish dreams.
Now, surgeons can operate using robotic hands on the opposite side of the planet, or using tiny tools on the end of a wire that can snake through the blood vessels to where surgery is needed. Waldos!
On crystalizing your commitment to a nine, achieving this for yourself does not change the world.
I am a fan of "flip!" by Peter Sheahan. It is a book of counterintuitive thinking. Which I like to think of as uncommon-common sense.
Changing the world, means crystallizing the commitment, the belief, the faith of the world in garbologie.. Making it something we not jut believe in, but take for granted as the way things should be...
Lost track with that train of thought somewhere there...
Where waste of resources is involved, what you are fighting against, is " the tragedy of the commons"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
You are probably familiar with the concept, coming from an environmental background.
People do what is easiest for themselves by default. To beat the tragedy, the better options need to be made to be easier than the easy negative options. Governments tend to try this by legislature, which leads to resentment. People are not sheep, they do eventually resent being herded. Just look at the carbon tax.. (not siding on right or wrong here.)
What to do then.. Make the better options more available, increase the knowledge of why, which elevates the ease of the option. Ease of mind.
Now we have a big microbial reactor processing sewerage near Cockburn, churning out fuel for industry. (big egg shaped building) how awesome is that..
I should be asleep...
Cheers,
Ken.