Just guessing here, but I doubt PEX piping is a major contributor, seeing as it's solid plastic that doesn't shed and is rarely exposed to the elements. The most common sources of micro plastics appear to be things like synthetic fibers in clothing, particles coming off of car tires as they wear down, manufactured plastic particulate like micro-beads/glitter, and plastic objects in the ocean that break down into smaller and smaller pieces due to physical abrasion, sun, damage, etc.
The report linked is concerned with more of the auditing side of the industry, which often claims to guarantee 100% brand safe placement. But which obviously does no such thing.
The most plausible reason they might need to dig them up is to remediate them. Landfills require maintenance in perpetuity, which costs a considerable amount of money. The biggest expense is maintaining the top cap—if it leaks, big problems can result.
After several centuries, it’s hard to imagine that most landfills will still be doing regular maintenance and fighting off entropy maintaining the cap. At some point, with the right technology, it becomes more sensible to reprocess the waste in a more permanent manner.
I think plasma gasification is likely the best idea, but it still needs work.
I would agree. Burying our post-nuclear family waste worldwide for the last 60 years will come back to haunt us. I also agree that we’ll have the tech to address it then into a more sustainable solution and possibly extract energy from it.
The most frustrating problem with plasma gasification from my perspective is that it essentially down cycles metals. That is, the metals either end up in slag or as a difficult-to-refine mixture.
That was my understanding the last time I worked on this. I would love to hear about any progress on this.
For what it’s worth, I think the companies that have tried this have not pursued the correct business model. They all either want to sell their system (bad idea) or sell syngas (ok, but not enough). What they need to do is charge tipping fees like a landfill to simply dispose of the trash.
I’ve tried to work on this problem, and it is MUCH more difficult than people realize.
If you are started with a single product (say a lithium ion battery), then you might stand a chance of developing a process that can recover a reasonable fraction of the metals.
But if you’re starting with a general pile of a bunch of stuff (CRTS, batteries, hard drives, PCBs, cables), it’s very difficult to optimize a process that catches even a modest amount of the valuable stuff. The metals are fused with nonmetallic stuff like plastic and ceramics. And the useful metals often end up being “down cycled” into less valuable alloys because they are difficult or uneconomical to separate. If that’s hard to believe, just try to think through how you would economically extract gold, silver, and copper from 100 kg of PCBs.
And the reality is that most ewaste does not come in nicely separated. The options are 1) spend extra money to have people separate stuff, 2) possibly develop AI systems to separate stuff, 3) have consumers separate their own stuff, or 4) develop better chemical processes that can actually handle a mixture.
I have tried to work on #4 with not much success. If anyone else has worked on this and would like to share their experience, drop a note.
Edit: another commenter drew the analogy to ore refining, but that’s not correct. Ores are much more homogenous relative to ewaste. It would be like if PCBS contained copper fused onto plexiglass—sure, then it would be easy to get at the copper. But it’s not just those two things—-it’s 100 things all bound together.
Further searching on the company name has not been entirely encouraging but maybe I'm doing it wrong. There was a company called Changing World Technologies that I was very excited about that failed to deliver on its promises, so my enthusiasm is quite tempered.
Yes! This is one of the ideas I’ve spent time on and am still somewhat curious about.
InEnTec is the leading company in the space (as far as I can tell) because they have good scientific leadership, a good academic pedigree, and an investment by Waste Management.
The technology still has its challenges. It is hard to make it economical relative to alternatives, for one. I also think executives are not driving at the correct business model, overemphasizing syngas production and underemphasizing just getting rid of waste and possibly recovering metals.
But the biggest problem I see in terms of its viability for recycling is that it is all down cycling. Valuable and precious metals all end up in either a hugely challenging mixed alloy, or they get wasted in the vitrified slag output.
I have been trying to find someone who can clarify if any progress has been made on this.
The website seems to be unmaintained, and searches for the company by name don't bring up anything past 2021. I think they're dead, which is quite the pity.
It obviously needs to be economically viable to pursue, but should be worthy of subsidies to help it find its footing--we'll all be well-served by having better recycling options.
If you learn anything more about this please share!
I think the ore analogy applies to EV batteries, which are very large, can be separated from the rest of the car relatively easily, sorted by type, and processed without other random junk mixed in. Recycling a random heap of arbitrary whole small devices mixed with other trash is a much more difficult problem.
While the article mentions stainless, it doesn’t really give it enough credit.
Lots of words describing the failures of the Statue of Liberty, but no words describing how the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the top of the Chrysler building (both stainless) have persisted for decades with absolutely zero corrosion. My understanding is that this has vastly exceeded the expectations of the initial engineers.
Stainless steel artifacts made today will still be around in a million years if they aren’t intentionally destroyed.
This is what I referenced in my post as plasma gasification.
It has been tried in the real world. Belgium planned to use it for landfill mining, and Britain planned to built two plants to process fresh trash. But this has all been shut down at this point due to engineering challenges and economic challenges.
I’m trying to find out if there is anyone out there trying to still plug away at this and make progress?
It's hard to believe something like that gets a net energy yield from burning the syngas, also technologies around syngas seem to struggle when competitive fuels are available.
The construction material bit is definite downcycling and even that sort of plasma torch might destroy PFAS it is (i) not going to destroy or isolate toxic metals like like and (ii) it is not going to extract various precious materials that are widely dispersed in waste: so low-value outputs can't really be good.
I've heard that the plasma torch can be tuned up to separate elements, at least coarsely, and if it could produce high value products it would be a big help.
My understanding is there really is no shortage of landfill space there is more of a political unwillingness to build more landfills. There is a huge interest in a "circular economy" but that precludes downcycling and of course making products recyclable is a start.
Another I find interesting is that very similar chemistry is being proposed for battery recycling as is used for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, it seems a technology similar to PUREX could be tuned up to extract just about anything out of a mixture of everything in the periodic table but probably not economically. Similarly there are all the "pyroprocessing" techniques based on molten salts and such that are not so discriminatory as PUREX but more so than the plasma torch.
You basically correctly identified the main reasons plasma gasification has not been viable and why it won’t be viable until these issues are resolved.
My inquiry basically amounts to whether anyone is working on these problems. There was a big push 10-20 years ago, but it seems people have given up.
There is plenty of land for landfills, but nobody wants them nearby. The bigger problem, however, is that in the long run, the encapsulations will all fail. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when. Until then, there are ongoing maintenance costs (such as mowing because you can’t let trees get root) that can add up quickly.
Someone has to work on this technology because it will eventually be needed for remediations (it already is needed for old, unlined landfills). It needs to capture the high-value metals (as you mentioned) and it needs to be economical in terms of initial capital costs as well as being at least energy neutral.
It doesn’t necessarily have to produce net energy since it can generate revenue the same way a landfill does (tipping fees), but it would be nice to at least get close to energy break even.
Anyway, I guess people have given up on this problem for now, sadly.
which I see as pessimistic. Although the plasma torch is using a fraction of the energy output, they are blasting oxygen or air into the reactor so pyrolysis is driven by combustion as well. The reactor is not breaking down dioxins so those need to be stripped. From an air pollution quality it looks acceptable but not great. Heterogenous feedstocks will confound the thing.
This gasification facility is in a class by itself,
it was not able to pay for its capital costs but after a bail out it has been highly successfully at paying its operations costs. It is highly optimized and it is not just selling natural gas but also nitrogen fertilizer (uses the nitrogen from the liquid air factory that makes oxygen for the blast) and coal tar products and even waste CO2. It has a huge coal seam across the street so it is always consuming the same stuff so the preprocessing and cleanup are all standardized. It was “too big to fail” so people did stay the course and get it spinning like a top.
To me, it seems the problem nobody is addressing is how to recycle valuable metals without them becoming part of the slag (ie we need something that can be used to break down electronic components to their rare metals and then capture them usefully). Everything I’ve read seems to just ignore this. Have you any thoughts on this?
The biggest of the past: the relatively thin crust that allows non-catastrophic volcanism, the dual composition of the crust so we have both oceanic and continental plates and the right amount of water to get both massive oceans and not so much as to be a water world, surviving the oxygenation catastrophe, evolution of multicellular life/Cambrian explosion, that the various inorganic carbon sinks and sources are balanced well enough for billion year evolutionary history, that we’re cooperative enough to work together while being competitive enough to develop new tech for “our side” (too little competition and we’d have stopped in c. 1860 tech and communism; too much competition and we’d be at each other’s throats and not be able to sustain global supply chains needed for modern computers).
Arguably the Moon is a big part of many of these things.
My best guess for the future: as we get more tech, it gets easier for individual insane people to blow up important things and/or kill lots of people. AI (never mind AGI/ASI) is just one of many such technologies that make this risk bigger, but even just sufficiently cheap electricity and manufacturing makes it (relatively) simple to use a cyclotron to enrich uranium.
The only way I can see past that is a ridiculous and unpleasant level of surveillance that you need some kind of AI to be able to achieve in the first place, with all the downsides that come with that surveillance, and that’s still the case even if you’re “only using the surveillance AI to find and section dangerously insane people, honest”.
> My best guess for the future: as we get more tech, it gets easier for individual insane people to blow up important things and/or kill lots of people.
I've been saying this recently. I think EM or similar could potentially take and defend a big area with the massive number of drones he could buy or build companies to produce. And that's without inventing any new tech, just mass producing specialized drones.
That's scary enough, but then imagine some small nation-state you've never thought much about, that has all that manpower and collective wealth, and maybe some ambition...
Tech is able to concentrate a big amount of power into a very small number of hands.
Sounds like we’re on the same page. As I’ve thought about this, I can’t escape the disorienting feeling that many more filters are in the past than in the future (and ones with worse probabilities are in the past too). Do you perceive the same? And does the cumulative probability of future filters seem smaller than the cumulative probability of past filters?
Given all the exoplanets with no signs of life, either abiogenesis is probably very hard or life is very fragile (~1e-3 or fewer planets will both develop life and retain it for long enough to pass through an oxygenation catastrophe, but that's squished several filters together).
Difficult to do more than guess past filters beyond oxygenation given the sample size of n=1.
Future? All unknown-unknowns. Even if you rule out paper-clipping-AI-gone-wrong scenarios by assuming only weak and narrow AI slightly less than we have today, the mere ability to get a million colonists to Mars, even with just SpaceX's Starship, requires enough space industry to be a direct military threat to Earth.
Where do you get the idea that HDDs only retain data for 5 years? The physics I learned in college suggests they will retain magnetic domains for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Yes they can fail mechanically (is this what you mean?) but you don’t necessarily lose your data.
They will fail mostly mechanically, but also the very small magnetized bits of modern HDDs will flip spontaneously at normal temperature after a much shorter time than "hundreds or even thousands of years" (because the energy needed to flip a small bit is not large enough in comparison to the thermal fluctuations to make the flipping probability negligible).
Many of these bit flips, but not all, will be corrected when the sectors are read, due to the error-correcting codes that are used in HDDs.
This is not theory, I have stored data for several years on more than 60 HDDs of various capacities from both WD and Seagate, most of them being the more expensive models with extended warranty durations, but even so, only few of the HDDs did not have any non-correctable error after several years. (Fortunately I was careful to use redundancy, so there was no data loss.)
Moreover, some of the biggest HDDs that are available now are no longer suitable for long term data storage, because in order to improve the performance they store metadata in a flash memory, which has a more limited data retention time.
After more than 5 years the complete loss of a HDD should be expected at any time, but even after 2 or 3 years a few non-correctable errors are probable.
When a HDD fails mechanically, one might pay a data recovery service, but that might have a price similar to a new HDD, so if you plan to not replace your HDDs often enough with the hope of using data recovery, it is pretty much certain that the cost will be much higher than replacing any HDD preemptively when its warranty expires.
I do archive work and have 20+ discs from the 2010 era. Mostly the first generation of PMR drives. I have never had any data degradation problems.
You can also find lots of YouTube videos of people spinning up drives from the 80s and 90s which still hold their data without problem.
More scientifically, the phenomenon you talk about is modeled by the Arrhenius equation (1), where the activation energy to flip a grain is given by KuV/KbT, where Ku is the anisotropy of the magnetic media, V is the volume of a grain, Kb is the Boltzmann constant, and T is temp in Kelvin.
HDD manufacturers engineer this ratio to be >60 (usually targeting 70-90 to be safe). Media manufacturing is imperfect, so there is a log normal distribution of grains on real-world media, but if we assume that 60 is the energy barrier for all grains, a KuV/KbT of 60 would mean it takes 362 million years for half the grains to flip, assuming an attempt frequency of 10^10.
Your math is probably right, but a modern HDD has more than 2^19 data bits.
Assuming that your computed time is right, that means that there is a 50% probability that one bit of a HDD will flip after less than a week.
Most such bit errors will be corrected when a sector is read and the controller will rewrite a bad sector with a valid value, so the bit errors will not be cumulative in normal usage.
However when the data is stored for years without powering up the HDD, the bit flips will accumulate and they may pass the threshold needed to cause an non-correctable error.
While I do not remember to have ever seen non-correctable errors on the HDDs that I have been using daily, on identical HDDs that have been stored for years without being powered up I have frequently seen both cases when the drive reported non-correctable errors and cases when the drive reported no error but the file hashes used for error detection identified corrupted files.
The older HDDs with low data capacities had much longer lifetimes, but also the perception of those claiming that data has been stored OK on them may be wrong if they have not used any means to detect the corrupted files, because even if the HDD reports no errors, that is not good enough.
One point of clarification: one bit on a classic PMR drive contains hundreds of magnetic grains. It is the grains that flip, not the bit. It would take many grain flips to affect the bit. Errors of this sort do not manifest as flipped bits per se—they manifest as a degraded signal, which the drive may or may not be able to translate to the correct bit sequence correctly. Also, the nature of ECC is (usually) that you get the correct sequence or an error. It would be unusual to get an incorrect sequence unless that is happening somewhere off-drive.
If you have a stored drive that is reporting errors, my starting assumption would be that something else is causing problems besides the platter—maybe the heads have gotten a bit of corrosion from humidity.
Because the HDD manufacturers avoid to provide the information that would be necessary to estimate with any degree of certainty the data retention time for HDDs, we cannot know for sure the causes of HDD errors during long term storage, so we can only speculate about them.
Nevertheless, the experimental facts, both from my experience during many years with many HDDs and from the reports that I have read are:
1. Immediately after the warranty of a HDD expires, the probability of mechanical failure increases a lot. I have seen several cases of HDD failures a few months after the warranty expiration, while I have never seen a failure before that (on drives that had passed the initial acceptance tests after purchase; some drives have failed the initial tests and have been replaced by the vendor).
Therefore one should never plan to store data on HDDs beyond their warranty expiration.
2. When data is stored on HDDs that are powered down for several years, one should expect a few errors (I have seen e.g. about one error per 2 to 8 TB of data), which cause either non-correctable errors or wrong corrections that corrupt the data.
The effect of such errors can be easily mitigated by storing 2 copies of each data file on 2 different HDDs.
An alternative is to introduce a controlled data redundancy, e.g. of 5% or 10%, with a program like "par2create".
That works fine against wrongly corrected sectors, but when a non-correctable error is reported, many file copy programs fail to copy any good sector following a bad sector, so one may need to write a custom script that will seek through the corrupt file and copy the good sectors, in order to get enough data from which the original file can be reconstructed.
Storing everything on 2 HDDs, preferably of different models, is the safest method, as it also guards against the case when one HDD is completely lost due to a mechanical defect.
