The End of the Plastic Bag Threat?

[balon!]

I can't believe it took so long to figure out, and it took a 16 year old kid to do it.

[iQuestor]

what an awesome idea! what a great, and very smart kid! Problem solving at its best.

[lucimay]

wow!! THAT SO COOL!! it sort of make me wonder why somebody didn't think of it sooner...or...maybe someone did and it
got keebashed! wouldn't be the first time a good, planet-friendly thing
got kaboshed by somebody who was making money off the planet-UNfriendly way something was being done.

we coulda converted the entire residential US to solar power 3 decades ago for about the cost of one nuclear power plant.

[Zarathustra]

Could have swore I read about this 12 years ago. Have to do some checking.

[shadowbinding shoe]

How helpful will this actually be? The problem is created by waste handling systems that don't separate the trash into specialized categories (bio-degradable, glass, plastic, metal). Those plastic bags wandering in the seas didn't come from the environment-conscious waste handling systems. When you throw all the different kinds of trash into one big (polyethylene made) trash bag and the country dumps it on one of their trash-mountains or in a river, it wouldn't matter if you had a germ that decomposed it in your lab.

Beside creating the needed artificial swamps (equipped with Oxygen pumps to make the water Oxygen rich for your germs) that hold one load of plastic bags for a couple of months before they can start handling a new load is pretty costly and inefficient I think. Probably more costly than burying it in the ground and waiting a 100 years or putting them in the over and turning them into instantaneous CO2 while cautiously containing any toxic gases from escaping.

[iQuestor]

How helpful will this actually be? The problem is created by waste handling systems that don't separate the trash into specialized categories (bio-degradable, glass, plastic, metal). Those plastic bags wandering in the seas didn't come from the environment-conscious waste handling systems. When you throw all the different kinds of trash into one big (polyethylene made) trash bag and the country dumps it on one of their trash-mountains or in a river, it wouldn't matter if you had a germ that decomposed it in your lab.

Beside creating the needed artificial swamps (equipped with Oxygen pumps to make the water Oxygen rich for your germs) that hold one load of plastic bags for a couple of months before they can start handling a new load is pretty costly and inefficient I think. Probably more costly than burying it in the ground and waiting a 100 years or putting them in the over and turning them into instantaneous CO2 while cautiously containing any toxic gases from escaping.

its a start. good ideas rarely come out fully formed.

[lucimay]

way to be positive, iQ!

[shadowbinding shoe]

Just saying that recycling-oriented waste handling system is the big hurdle here. Most people just throw everything together in their waste bin. After this basic issue is addressed, we can start working on making the recycling of the various wastes more efficient.

I think Malik has a point. The germ-solution is not a new concept. It's just not applied so far.

[jennyj]

What do you think about plastic bags and their effect on the environment?

[sgt.null]

i think it's a good start and i wonder why it takes a kid to get us to this point. maybe we should put a host of kids on the fuel problem? Or the internal combustion engine problem.

[Rigel]

we coulda converted the entire residential US to solar power 3 decades ago for about the cost of one nuclear power plant.

I wish.

According to this page, the capital cost per kWh for nuclear power is 1.38 euro cents per kW, or about $0.02 US. Let's assume an 80% uptime, and an average family needs capacity of 3kW, then the cost of planning for one family would be about $657 dollars (ignoring ongoing maintenance and replacement; this is just building the capacity).

Just to pick a random quote, you can get the same capacity for solar installed for a mere $27,000.

Of course, this is an extremely rough estimate; on the one hand, I don't have any information about maintenance and replacement (which could drastically affect the final cost estimate); on the other, industrial power generation stations don't have to plan for peak usage by everybody, whereas if you're supplying just your home, you want to plan for the maximum you'll use.

Nuclear remains one of the safest and cheapest sources of power for our society. There's just that pesky problem of fuel disposal; just to bring it back on topic, however, nuclear fuel disposal is a much smaller problem than, say, plastic garbage floating in the ocean.

[Rigel]

i think it's a good start and i wonder why it takes a kid to get us to this point.

Because he's solving the wrong problem.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great he's doing this. But the problem with waste disposal is separation of the materials, not breaking them down once they're separated.

[Orlion]

Solar power is very inefficient. VERRRRRY inefficient. I don't have the calculations on me anymore, but in an inorganic chemistry class, we learned that theoretically, you can get around 20 % efficiency out of a solar cell. That's theoretical. Right now, if you spend loads of money on it, you can get around 15 %. Most cells run aroun 12 %. I don't know what the efficiency of nuclear power is, but I bet it's higher than 20%