Landfills are the main source of most raw materials in the near future — perhaps 16–64 years out. Here on Earth, with the exceptions of tiny amounts in experimental nuclear reactors, we really only consume helium and free energy. Everything else, well, we just convert it from one form to another. Some of it, like phosphate lost to agricultural runoff, is converted to a much more dilute form, and therefore one much more difficult to recover. But almost any landfill has a higher concentration of valuable elements than the original ore from which those elements were mined.
Garbage mining, of course, is nothing new — there are tens of thousands of cartoneros both here in Argentina and in Brazil, the figure of the "rag and bone man" goes back generations, and automotive junkyards are nothing more than open-air landfills to "mine" for specialized parts. But improvements in robotics and AI will make economic the recovery of valuable materials from increasingly dilute waste streams, as well as those that are too hazardous for human mining.
Once we have von Neumann probes, it seems likely that we will do some asteroid mining. I don't know what effect that will have on the markets for raw materials, except that it will almost certainly make the platinum group cheaper.
If in 25 years time we're sitting around a small fire somewhere in the last inhabitable part of the arctic region you owe me a week's worth of roasted rats or one human leg.
If we're at a convention hosted by the first self-aware AI on an orbital platform I owe you a home fabrication device.
That's a win/win for you. If society fails and you need to eat roasted rats or humans to survive, you have a meal ready for you.
If society succeeds and creates a good society, you're down just one cheap home fabrication device but living in a society where you don't have to eat rats.
In other countries your definition of hazardous is an acceptable risk. My mother tells me stories of people rooting through garbage in the Philippines. I also went to my local freegeek (and won't go back again because I can't tolerate the low quality air). Also, in Ghana a bunch of electronics gets processed by people (and they are quite toxic) from our consumer electronics. From this article it seems like they were able to salvage computers (at a considerable risk) See
https://medium.com/@felipearaujo22/i-was-looking-for-africas...
I don't know why people throw away their consumer electronics. I got an Original iPhone for $5 and sold it back to AT&T for $100 trade in credit (this was in 2012). I also used the phone on their 2G network for six months and connected to local WiFi.
It seems like the era of von Neumann probes would be pretty late to start mining asteroids. We'll presumably be mining near-Earth objects long before we have self-replicating probes. There are already several companies working on that, after all.
Has anyone else seen the "tornado in a silo" startup? Maybe 10 years ago? I dimly recall a "Hexa-" prefix.
Alternative to incinerators; instead of combustion, break stuff down to bits using wind. Then just sort thru the resulting slurry, pulling out the good bits.
Edit: Aha. Windhexe circa 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windhexe I always wondered if heated air vortexes could be used to preprocess electronics for material recycling.
Metal oxidizes, plastics weep plasticizers and become brittle, paper turns into mulch, we literally burn fossil fuels. We consume a lot more than just helium and free energy, and more if you remember that recycling costs yet more energy.
Metal in an unoxidized form, carbon and hydrgoen in nice forms known as "plastic", "paper", and "fossil fuels" are free energy. We don't consume the metal or the carbon/hydrogen, we consume the energy that has it in this nice usable form. More energy will get it back to that nice usuable form.
Incidinetally this is why I think Fusison/"Orders of magnitude better energy sources" (of which Fusion is the only viable one I'm aware of) are pretty much the most important thing for the overall continued stability of civilization.
More energy will get it back to that nice usuable form.
Um yeah, but until we have fusion which isn’t anytime soon, you’re proposing that we keep transforming energy, with losses at each step. In reality, where we have to live, and our energy isn’t coming from hypothetical sources, reconstituting plastic and reversing metal oxidation makes no sense at all.
We do have fusion. It's very conveniently located a safe* distance away and blasts us with continuous energy. We just need to get better at collecting and storing it. Instead of engaging in behavior that results in that energy cooking our planet.
* we have a few hundred million years or so to find a new one before it becomes markedly less safe.
Heh, I'm a total layman so this could be trivially impossible, but could we not somehow put a fusion reactor into orbit around earth such that its own gravity would contain itself just like a star? Or would that just not be feasible?
Sure, we could trivially make our own star. All we'd need to do is move at least 100 Jupiters worth of mass into close proximity, and voila! Insta-star. That last part is not so trivial though...
The difficulty us mere mortals have with sustained fusion is keeping the reaction from blowing itself apart (as in dissipation, not bomb). Gravity keeps things in check for free, but since gravity is so weak compared to atomic forces, you need an awful lot of it.
Our current containment solutions using electromagnetic forces require a lot of energy to maintain and so far, more than produced from the resulting fusion reaction.
What if we were to combine both methods? Try to put an electromagnetic containment solution into space? Could we possibly find a medium between electromagnetic forces and gravitational forces that would allow us to make it hold together without having to actually have something as massive as a star?
I hope that you’re right, but in a way I hope that you’re wrong too. If we could establish a robust space industry, with orbital manufacturing, then we can get those materials from asteroids. If we’re going for what is presently science fiction, let’s go for exciting science fiction. I’d rather see our drones mine asteroids than landfills.
Reconstituting plastic is what your body does every time you pack on a pound of fat as you comment on Hacker News — the only difference between a molecule of saturated fat and three molecules of kerosene is a little COOH group on the end and a glycerin to tie them together. Reversing metal oxidation is where we get the metal in the first place, with the notable exceptions of copper and some precious metals. And it has been for several thousand years. We dig up rocks made of metal oxides and reverse the oxidation. I'm just saying it's often easier to dig up the more concentrated oxides in landfills instead, and that economic advantage will grow as accessible natural deposits are mined out.
Silicon, aluminum, iron, and concrete excepted, naturally.
And, yeah, this uses energy. That's why I mentioned accessible energy as one of the two things we do actually consume.
If your solution requires technology which isn’t even close to being practical, then you’re just going on about sci-fi. That’s very interesting, and with a few exceptions sci-fi usually gets it wrong.
I am not sure what you are talking about, but technology to produce metals from their oxides has been practical since at least Çatal Höyük, 8500 years ago, and cracking and distilling random mixtures of hydrocarbons to make plastic has been practical since 1939. Catalytic cracking has been the main way we make plastics since then, although it was in use to produce fuel and lubricants since a few years earlier.
My best guess is that you didn't read the comment you are replying to, so I am hoping that repeating it in more detail, as I have above, will result in you reading it.
Certainly, right now we really are consuming that free energy, as OP suggested. It's not coming back.
But OP's point holds, all we are consuming is free energy (in the form of oil deposits, ore deposits, etc). And helium (in the form of gas, which escapes the atmosphere). Nothing else.
No, it's a point of view. A lot of people in this conversation seem to be stuck on human-level understandings of objects, as if "paper" is something that has an objective existence, and if we "consume" the paper, now there's one piece of paper less that the universe will ever see. It's the Aristotelian view of the universe as consisting of the four elements, only with a lot more elements in it.
Instead, watch the atoms you learned about in chemistry class, which have the advantage of being real. They're generally conserved. (Not 100%, but places where we're changing atoms are very fringe in our economy.) Converting paper into a mushy mess is just introducing entropy into the paper. With energy invested we can turn those atoms back into paper. With our current tech level that may be a very long, winding, expensive journey, but it could be easier. Plus as we develop tech, we will start tending to prefer organizations of atoms that are easier to create in the first place, which is why you hear about things like the "diamond age".
With enough energy, we can rearrange atoms in almost any way we'd like. We don't dump things in landfills because we have no use for the atoms, we dump them there because it's too energetically expensive to undo the entropy introduced into them by our usage that has put them in their current high-entropy, low-use configuration. If we solved that problem, landfills wouldn't exist. That's a big "if", absolutely, no denying it. But if you, say, really passionately wanted to solve the landfill problem and not just nibble around the edges, this is the angle you should be taking.
This is already happening and has been for a while. Not entirely sure why this is somehow a new thought, people have been proposing it for a long time, just few companies want to get their hands dirty.
"Before its acquisition he had been the cofounder 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. It had been a surprise when Praxis had acquired them, a very pleasant surprise, as everyone in Dumpmines went from employment in a small firm to apprentice membership in one of the richest organizations in the world - paid in its shares, voting on its policy, free to use all its resources. It was like being knighted." - Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, 1993.
It's interesting that the article comes out of Sweden, who's pretty good at not throwing stuff in landfills. After recycling materials and energy less than 1% of the material ends up in landfills here. The environemntal benefits of incineration (which isn't "recycling") are disputed of course, but at least it reduces need for other sources of energy, and obviously means we don't just aggregate trash like a landfill does.
So much food is thrown away by grocery stores on the expiration date or just the day after. Usually you can eat that for a few more days, but grocery stores do not want to take the risk of selling it.
I used to get free vegetables and bread from the supermarket this way.
The vegetables were kept in a separate wheely-bin from the skips, so it was a lot more hygienic than just diving into a dumpster with everything mixed in. The bread was also kept in separate bags, next to the dumpsters. I think that all the discarded bread and vegetables went to local farmers for animal feed.
Only a tiny subset of food is legally required to have an expiration date. In the UK this is the "use by" date. In Canada it's the "expiration date." But, you'll find this, or "best by" dates on way more products, because they want to move more product.
In the US, for example, only infant formula is required by federal law to have an expiration date (1). The same page states that: "Foods not exhibiting signs of spoilage should be wholesome and may be sold, purchased, donated and consumed beyond the labeled "Best if Used By" date."
In the UK, and the rest of the EU, there are only two packaged goods that do not need an expiration date: water, and table salt without iodine. The other exception is fresh fruits and vegetables.
The legality and morality of donating food past its expiration date is somewhat murky and different depending on jurisdiction. I know France passed a law specifically allowing the practice, and its at least tolerated in Germany.
That's why in many countries the food gets distributed to those in need just before the date. It's minimal loss to the store as people don't anyway want food dated for tomorrow.
If anybody is interested in the lives of the people who scour landfills for recyclable/resaleable materual, there was a Brazilian documentary about such folks in Rio - Waste Land. It was very moving.
Robots will eventually become as small and as cheap as insects, so it stands to reason that many heretofore expensive activities will become cheap. And there's probably enough energy sitting in the landfill to power resource recovery too.
Is this feasible now? I have no idea. But it is inevitable.
The 2nd book in Becky Chamber's Wayfarer series touches on this, they didn't bother using robots, they just use small children bred for the purpose[1].
How about a YC startup around this? I'm probably not qualified to work on this problem but have been thinking about it a lot. "One man's trash is another man's treasure"?
I would think the waste management companies have this on lockdown but maybe I'm mistaken.
Certainly seems worth doing and there seem to be profits possible in it (not to mention possible social and environmental benefits).
It's definitely a big market, but I wouldn't underestimate existing efforts in the space.
China just recently banned the import of bulk plastic, which has had repercussions far and wide, especially in the EU. There are automatic sorting machines, including many by startups. But the problem is quite hard.
Ultimately product packaging may need to change, too. Currently, a bag for coffee may contain ten layers of different plastics, metals, and papers, all fused together.
Potentially interesting sidenote: Automatic landfill detection is possible from satellites - I was exploring a potential project working on this problem some time ago, but ultimately decided to not do it.
I think it would be a very cool automation problem to solve. Whether it's fresh garbage or landfills, it all could be separated into recycled materials or base components.
Garbage mining, of course, is nothing new — there are tens of thousands of cartoneros both here in Argentina and in Brazil, the figure of the "rag and bone man" goes back generations, and automotive junkyards are nothing more than open-air landfills to "mine" for specialized parts. But improvements in robotics and AI will make economic the recovery of valuable materials from increasingly dilute waste streams, as well as those that are too hazardous for human mining.
Once we have von Neumann probes, it seems likely that we will do some asteroid mining. I don't know what effect that will have on the markets for raw materials, except that it will almost certainly make the platinum group cheaper.