Comment by eru
20 hours ago
Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch?
(The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics.
Especially considering the extra logistics and quality degradation that recycling entails.
Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.)
Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view?
The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare.
Do you need it spelling out more clearly?
We are sitting on 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg ball of matter. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the centre of the solar system that's providing us with energy.
Some resources are still scarce. And a lot of those 6E24 kg is iron and nickel we can never get to. Another big fraction is basically molten stone. And we really should stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere.
Also, if you go for measures like mass processed, the weight of microchips, pcbs, parts is only a tiny fraction of what has to be processed and build in the supply chain.
Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly.
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That sounds like an almost Malthusian viewpoint.
The world has effectively infinite resources, getting more is usually just a matter of figuring out better extraction techniques or using better energy.
The world only has effectively infinite resources if growth slows down, because exponentials get out of hand surprisingly quickly.
For example at 1% energy growth per year it would only take around 9-10k years before to reach an annual consumption equal to all the energy in the Milky Way galaxy. By "all the energy" I don't just mean consuming all the solar energy from all the stars, and using all the fissionable material in reactors, and fusing everything that can fuse, and burning all the burnable stuff. No, I mean also using all the gravitational potential energy in the galaxy, and somehow turning everything that has mass into energy according to E=mc^2.
From there at 1% annual growth it is only another 2-3k years to using all the energy in the whole observable universe annually.
Population at 1% growth also gets out of hand surprisingly quickly. If we don't get FTL travel then in about 12k years we run out space. That's because in 12k years with no FTL we can only expand into a spherical region of space 12k lightyears in radius. At 1% annual growth from the current population in 12k years the volume of humans would be more than fits in the sphere--and that's assuming we can pack humans so there is no wasted space.
We actually have population growth under 1% now, down to around 0.85%, but that only gets us another 2-3k years.
>effectively infinite resources
Sure, like effectively infinite atmospheric carbon sink, effectively infinite Helium, effectively infinite fresh water, effectively infinite trees ... we've treated these things as true, because the World is big and population of humans wasn't so big we've got away with that for a time, now those presumptions are coming to bite us, hard.
Yes, we can work our way out of some holes, maybe all of them. But we have to make things sustainable first, then spend those resources. We're not wizards, deus ex machina only reliably happens in movies.
A little Malthusian.
> Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.
Directly reusing plastic bottles that were not meant to be is bad for your health though, isn't it?
The biggest risks are that single-use bottles are usually pretty difficult to clean (usually a narrow opening). The second biggest, which is related, is that those single-use bottles usually aren't very rigid and will tend to make small cracks in the surface as the material flexes which makes things even harder to clean. After that, all the cracks that will develop will mean it'll leach out the bad stuff in the plastics far faster than if you had some other kind of water bottle.
If you just opened it and drank the drink in it, there's probably no harm in filling it soon after and using it a few times like that. Using that same disposable bottle for a few months is probably not a good idea.