Geosequestra-what? The new way to recycle carbon emissions back into earth.

Geosequestration, what is it? What does it mean? Good questions, because it could very well be the new out for the coal industry. So what is it, and why does it make the coal industry look like the good guys, well sequestration is banishment or exile, based on the literal definition of the word. If we combine it with CO2 sequestration we come up with CO2 banishment. When we add geo- to as an prefix to the word sequestration, we get ground/earth banishment. So CO2 geosequestration is the banishment/exile of CO2 into the earth/ground. Sounds like a great idea, hey global warming is CO2 being pumped into the air, lets take the CO2 and put it into the ground. Logics all there, but this is BAD according to an article by Micheal Graham Richard at treehugger.com, there are many inherent problems with geosequestration.

In his article, he quotes a book by the Author Tim Flannery, and his book  The Weather Makers. In the book he outlines a passage that explains the first problem with geosequestration, the mode of which this is done is through a new type of coal burning power plant. This new type of power plant is called coal gasification, it actually turns the coal into a gas, and this is done by mixing oxygen and water with the coal. The problem here is that just to turn the coal into gas already takes 25% of the energy the plant produces! So how counter productive is that, as the article stated it is better to saved watts than to create one with one. Not to mention they are more expensive, and to get the infrastructure up and going for these plants is timely, something we don’t have. Time is of th essence when dealing with global warming.

Two, the second reason why geosequestration is counter-productive, is that you have to spend 20% of the energy yielded from burning coal just to turn the gasified CO2 into a liquid state. Also as quoted from the book, one tonne of coal burned creates 3.7 tonnes of CO2 emissions. This a 3.7 increase in the amount of CO2 that needs to be turned into a gas, so already you would be putting back more than you took out. Going beyond that fact, you can’t always  just return the CO2 right back under the power plant, most of the time the plant was built over an area that is not suitable to holding liquified CO2. So you have to create a pipeline to an area that can hold the CO2 underground, this takes millions of dollars for construction costs and not to mention, more energy.

The last big issue with geosequestration is the fact that, there is not even close to a 100% gaurantee that the liquified gas will stay put, when you put helium into balloon, it doesnt stay in there forever, even though the rubber balloon is extremely air tight. This is the same for an underground storage were the CO2 would be stored. The liquid will convert back to gas, and according to the law of physics, gas pressure pushes on all sides with the same amount of force. The gas will escape, either or time or due to an unforseen accident. So this is just a bandaid fix, it ins’t like the Carbon in the CO2 is being converted back into solid rock, it stays a gas, and as more and more liquid is pumped in, the pressure will rise until it finds a way to relieve itself. So eventually the CO2 will find its way out back into our atmosphere, thus recontributing to the already growing problem.

The only way, I know of putting back CO2 into the earth is through plants. They are the only natural sequestration device, they naturally use the carbon in CO2 to build themselves, and thus holding that carbon for a long, long time. Unfortunately, as we are tearing down our rainforests, and forests around the world, we are destroying our only natural source of sequestration. So as long as this is going on what chance do we have?

Plastic Waste Awareness… In Our Own Backyard.

UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO BEATS WASTE.

Happening right now, a school in our city has decided enough is enough. Plastic waste contributes more than any other type of waste to the detriment of our environment.

Although they could have gone a step further in building up awareness towards recycling by putting in more recycling bins and possibly redesigning their whole waste management systems. This is a step in the right direction. For me, buying bottled water is somewhat of an idiotic action, seeing as you can get it free from water fountains.

Also, they are replacing all plastic water bottle places of sale, and replacing them with either water fountains or water canteen refillment stations. This in a way is recycling at its or, since recycling is basically just reusing, people are using multi-use water canteens which arn’t single use.

I think it would be wonderful if SFSU was able to follow in their footsteps, seeing as there are many environmentally concious people that attend this school. It might cost a bit, something a public university can’t technically afford, but we should applaud there actions for taking steps to get single unse water bottles out of the waste stream.

What is The Plastiki?

What is The Plastiki?.

What is the plastiki you ask? Well it is an ingenious idea, using nothing but recycled plastic. You heard right, a sailboat made completely(almost) of reused plastic.

 

The boats hull is made out of 12,500 reused PET bottles, and is held together by self-reinforced PET. The mast is made of reclaimed aluminum irrigation pipe, and the sail is made from recycled PET cloth. A 100% recyclable plastic called seretex and a brand new organic glue made of cashew nut husks and sugar cane.

 

The ship weighing in at 12 tons, its dimensions are as follows; 60 feet long by 40 feet high. Each of the bottles has been pressurized with 12 grams of dry ice, filling the bottles with pressurized carbon dioxide once the dry ice evaporates. True fact, in the United States 12,500 plastic bottles are consumed ever 8.3 seconds…

The voyage of this amazing vessel, left port of San Francisco on may 20, to navigate 8,500 miles to Sydney Australia.

 

MLM or Multi-level marketing a.k.a. “Pyramid Scheme.”

So the other day I was at the gym, and this guy was looking at me, so finally he says “hi, how are you doing?”, me being courteous, respond and we get into a general discussion about techniques and weight-lifting routines. After awhile we start to talk about what we do outside of the gym, all the while i’m showing him good exercises. He tells me he needs somebody to help him out, hes an entrepeneur and he does Web 2.0 and is into the supplements/health business. I think nothing of it, he just said he is going to need someone who can work 5-10 hours a week and maybe make a extra couple hundred bucks. So i’m like sure I can use the money. Still to this point he doesn’t really tell me what he wants me to do, but I didn’t think much of it. He just says, he we should connect for lunch and talk business, so I said sure lets do it. All the while he is smiling saying hey lets have fun, make some money.

Fast forward, the next day, were meeting for lunch at a thai restaurant, super casual. Thinking back to the day before I thought something was odd about this guy, but I go along with it saying nothing ventured nothing gained. We meet for lunch, and we sit down and immediately he comes out me, “so, greg tell me about your self?” I explain alittle about myself, he asks me if I like to travel, or where I’ve been, we really connect I start to like this guy. So after an hour of chatting I ask him, what exactly does he do, what is your business? He’s like I’m glad you asked me that, he pulls out a pad and pen, and draws up two words: Active and passive income. He asks me what I think those mean, he tells me active is what you work for, passive is money that works for you. He writes down companies and says, “imagine if we can connect all these companys, we are the networkers.” He goes on to say, “what if I told you, you could make around 10,000 dollars over 2-3 months? Or fastforward 2-3 years and you could make 100,000 dollars, how does that sound?” I say “wow, that would be amazing,” but in the back of my mind my skepticism is rising, this sounds too good to be true. So he says, “Greg, lets meet again, me and my partner want to interview you, how about tonight around say 5?” It’s friday, i’m not going to go to a job interview on the weekend, so we plan for a tuesday night, at 7:15. He tells me its a group interview, and I say, “why can’t you just interview me at a seperate time?”, he says, “Oh well if I spent an hour per person I would’nt have any time during the week for anything.” Fair enough, so on the way out he aks me what I think I can bring to the company, he is telling me teamwork is key, its good to work in a team. I shoot back that yea, I’d rather work in a team, there is no presumption that solo work is not possible. So I say, sales isn’t really what I’m trying to do, he responds that I won’t have to do sales. So we say our good-byes and I leave with a good feeling about this. All the while, he never told me what exactly he wanted me to do for him, or what he does at all. Only come to the interview and we’ll cover it there.

So, remembering back to our lunch meeting, I noticed he had a bottle with the brand, nutrilite, I asked him about it and he said, “Oh, this is one of the products we sell, there are many I’ll have to show you them all.” So, today, I type in google: nutrilite scam, (btw this is really great for seeing if anything, especially if you are buying online from website, just type in what it is and type in scam after and it will bring up any articles about the scam if any.) There it pops up, a yahoo answers asking the same question, I click the link, and low and behold the answer comes up with multi-level marketing. I type in multi-level marketing in google and I do my research and yup, it was too good to be true.

In conclusion, I find myself to be pretty skeptical, the whole time this guy was telling me he need me to work for him, I found it odd he never told me, what exactly he wanted me for. I wasn’t duped by the pyramid-scheme I know those are a no-no but this guy just beat around the bush so well, he played it off as so casual, and really it was his presentation or his “selling” that got me to bite the bait. I told, him I could make the meeting, but I’m not going to waste my time knowing his agenda and the organization he is selling.

So, here is a great article that goes super in-depth on pyramid schemes and the number of problems they present.

Some parallels with the article and my actual experience with this modern day snake oil salesman.

• “MLMs work by geometric expansion, where you get ten to sponsor ten to sponsor ten, and so on. This is usually shown as an expanding matrix (just don’t say “pyramid”!) with corresponding kick-backs at various levels.” Well here is how he put it without exposing the “pyramid,” saying that everyone spends atleast 10 dollars a day on stuff they don’t really use or need. Now if you could get 200 people to even just spend a quarter of the money, for a month you’d have 15,000 dollars, (some out of this world figure). He told me one of the guys has 20 people working under him and he’s making 100,000 a month.
• “Thus, MLM has evolved into a “niche”: it can be used to sell products that could not be sold any other way. An MLM is a way to get undue credibility by exploiting people’s personal friendships and relationships via ‘networking.'” Here’s the thing, he never told me i’d be selling anything, he just asked me a bunch of time’s if I work good as a team. I’m guessing a team to him is other people working under him, and were all duped into buying products that don’t sell?
• “MLMs grow by exploiting people’s relationships. If you are going to be in an MLM, you swallow hard and accept this as part of “building your business.” This is “networking.” But to those not “in” the MLM, it seems as if friendship is merely a pretext for phoniness, friendliness is suspected as prospecting, and so on. There is no middle ground here, try as you might.” This is how he started it out, that we were going to “have fun,” and money was going to “work for us,” there was no indication i’d sell to my friends and family.
• “Thus, a parallel or “shadow” pyramid of motivational tapes, seminars, and videos emerges. These are a “must for success,” and recruits are strong-armed into attending, buying, buying, and buying all the more. ” I’m assuming the group interview would be this, going to the seminar, where we would have seen a bunch of promotional tapes and would be pressured into buying the product right there.

So, as a cautionary note for anyone reading this, he did not explicitly say that I would be doing multi-level marketing, but I’d say its safe to assume that because he never told me exactly what he wants me to do, that I should be good at working in a team, and the fact that If I make this many sales I can make this much money. Also I asked how the pay would be, and he said we’ll figure that out at a different time, based on what you can do. So all in all nutrilite+shady job offer+testimony that sounds like a pyramid scheme. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it must be a duck.

Its just plastic, how many types can there be?

Everyone knows or should know plastics are recyclable, what many don’t know is there are different types of plastics and some are more recycle friendly than others. So what are these different plastics and how many are there?

Well it turns out that there are 7 different types in use, PET/PETE, HDPE, PVC, LDPE, PP, PS, and other (containing all the rest of the miscellaneous plastic types.) These 7 have number codes corresponding to what chemical the plastic this is. The number is called a Resin Identification code. You can usually find the number in a triangle of arrows representing the recycle symbol. Most of the time this symbol is on the bottom of the container. Here is a nifty site I found which breaks down each.

So now that you know the 7 different types, let me give you some examples of each,

• PET/PETE would include: Soft drink, water and beer bottles; mouthwash bottles; peanut butter containers; salad dressing and vegetable oil containers; ovenable food trays.

• Some things these can be recycled into include: Polar fleece, fiber, tote bags, furniture, carpet, paneling, straps, (occasionally) new container.

• HDPE which includes:  milk jugs, shampoo bottles, motor oil bottles, and cereal box liners among other things.

• These can recycled into: Laundry detergent bottles, oil bottles, pens, recycling containers, floor tile, drainage pipe, lumber, benches, doghouses, picnic tables, fencing.

• PVC includes some the following:  window cleaner and detergent bottles, food container. wrapping,  cooking oil bottles, and piping.

• These can be recycled into: decks, paneling, speedbumps, flooring, cables and mats.

• LDPE which includes some of the following: Squeezable bottles; bread, frozen food, dry cleaning and shopping bags; tote bags; clothing; furniture; carpet.

• LDPE can be recycled into: trash can liners and cans, compost bins, shipping envelopes, flooring, floor tiles, and shipping envelopes.

• PP includes some of the following: some yogurt containers, katchup bottles, medicine bottles, syrup bottles, caps, and straws.

• These can be recycled into: Signal lights, battery cables, brooms, brushes, auto battery cases, ice scrapers, landscape borders, bicycle racks, rakes, bins, pallets, trays.

• PS which includes some of these: Disposable plates and cups, meat trays, egg cartons, carry-out containers, aspirin bottles, compact disc.

• Ps can be recycled into: Insulation, light switch plates, egg cartons, vents, rulers, foam packing, carry-out containers.

• Lastly we have the seventh which isn’t any one plastic, its just considered Other: hree- and five-gallon water bottles, ‘bullet-proof’ materials, sunglasses, DVDs, iPod and computer cases, signs and displays, certain food containers, nylon.

• These Other plastics can be recycled into: Plastic lumber and custom made products.

Terminology used in different types of plastics recycling and recovery.

ASTM D5033 definitions	equivalent ISO 15270 (draft) definitions	other equivalent terms
primary recycling	mechanical recycling	closed-loop recycling
secondary recycling	mechanical recycling	downgrading
tertiary recycling	chemical recycling	feedstock recycling
quaternary recycling	energy recovery	valorization

From:

Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009 July 27; 364(1526): 2115–2126.

doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0311.

 

Comparing some environmental impacts of commodity polymer production and current ability for recycling from post-consumer sources.

	LCI data cradle-to-gate (EU data)
polymer	energy (GJ tonne−1)	water (kL tonne−1)	CO2-ea (t tonne−1)	Usageb (ktonne)	closed-loop recycling	effectiveness in current recycling processes
PET	82.7	66	3.4	2160	yes	high with clear PET from bottles coloured PET is mostly used for fibre additional issues with CPET trays, PET-G
HDPE	76.7	32	1.9	5468	some	high with natural HDPE bottles, but more complex for opaque bottles and trays because of wide variety of grades and colour and mixtures with LDPE and PP
PVC	56.7	46	1.9	6509	some	poor recovery because of cross-contamination with PET PVC packages and labels present a major issue with PET bottle and mixed plastics recycling
LDPE	78.1	47	2.1	7899	some	poor recovery rates, mostly as mixed polyolefins that can have sufficient properties for some applications. Most post-consumer flexible packaging not recovered
PP	73.4	43	2.0	7779	in theory	not widely recycled yet from post-consumer, but has potential. Needs action on sorting and separation, plus development of further outlets for recycled PP
PS	87.4	140	3.4	2600	in theory	poor, extremely difficult to cost-effectively separate from co-mingled collection, separate collection of industrial packaging and EPS foam can be effective
recycled plastics	8–55	typical 3.5c	typical 1.4	3130	some	considerable variability in energy, water and emissions from recycling processes as it is a developing industry and affected by efficiency of collection, process type and product mix, etc.

Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009 July 27; 364(1526): 2115–2126.

doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0311.

 

Items you can recycle, but usually are not.

How much recyclable stuff ends up in land-fills? The answer is not easy to find, and i’m sure there are a lot of people who are throwing recyclable item into their trash cans. Here are some items that are fully recycleable but usually end up in the landfill anyways. Items such as a batteries or a spray cans are almost 100% recycleable and they should be.

 Reading an article here, I found out about a new program to take aerosol spray cans and recycle them. Now im pretty sure ive seen on the bottles the little recycle symbol, but I didn’t know that these were ending up in landfills at such high rates.

 Some more easily recycleable items include; crayons(this was a big surprise), the packing peanuts, wine corks, and a few more industrial items. Another biggie that should always be recycled, but I have been told to throw away, is batteries, yes batteries are a big one that no one really thinks to recycle. Food waste is a major item to be recycled, not only does it recycle 100% but it also contributes to a healthier environment, putting nutrients back into the soil!   So remember when you have the normal household item that is to be thrown away, check that it can be recycled for the environments sake.

Lesser of two evils: Incineration vs Land-fills.

Browsing across the internet, I came across a really neat article. The dilemmna was simple, whats worse, incinerating your garbage or putting it in a landfill. While the perferrable method is to recycle all you can, some times that method isn’t available. So whats worse, lets look at it.

Land-fills, as the article states, are big gashes in the earth we place all our waste. While the effects on the surrounding environment can be minimalized with proper lining and cover, a major drawback is the amount of methane released from it. Along with improper lining, the ground water can be severely polluted.

Incinerators arn’t much better, probably the worst aspect of incineration is that your putting the trash into the air. The remains are the ashes, which are composed mostly of heavy metals and the unburned trash. The mostly toxic heavy metals still pose environmental risk if they are recycled. What’s put into the air is much worse though. Chemicals ranging from mostly harmless, yet globally warming, carbon dioxide; to a chemical class called dioxins. These chemicals are known to cause cancer, and contain PCB’s.

Mentioned in the article above is a comprehensive study that tackles this exact problem in pinpoint detail. Some facts from this article are:

• Recycling causes 1300 less pounds of solid waste than incineration and 2800 less pounds of solid waste than land-fills.
• Recycled production plus recycling results in the lowest air emissions of the three systems in 9 of 10 major pollutant categories.
• Virgin production plus landfilling uses over 17 million Btus more energy per ton of material pro-cessed than does recycled production plus recycling and over 5 million Btus more per ton than does virgin production plus incineration.

(Btu is a British Thermal Unit, a measurement of energy.)

Here are quotes from a scientific article that does an indepth review of plastic recycling:

Landfill

Landfill is the conventional approach to waste management, but space for landfills is becoming scarce in some countries. A well-managed landfill site results in limited immediate environmental harm beyond the impacts of collection and transport, although there are long-term risks of contamination of soils and groundwater by some additives and breakdown by-products in plastics, which can become persistent organic pollutants (Oehlmann et al. 2009; Teuten et al. 2009). A major drawback to landfills from a sustainability aspect is that none of the material resources used to produce the plastic is recovered—the material flow is linear rather than cyclic. In the UK, a landfill tax has been applied, which is currently set to escalate each year until 2010 in order to increase the incentive to divert wastes from landfill to recovery actions such as recycling (DEFRA 2007).

 

Incineration

 

Incineration reduces the need for landfill of plastics waste, however, there are concerns that hazardous substances may be released into the atmosphere in the process. For example, PVC and halogenated additives are typically present in mixed plastic waste leading to the risk of dioxins, other polychlorinated biphenyls and furans being released into the environment (Gilpin et al. 2003). As a consequence primarily of this perceived pollution risk, incineration of plastic is less prevalent than landfill and mechanical recycling as a waste-management strategy. Japan and some European countries such as Denmark and Sweden are notable exceptions, with extensive incinerator infrastructure in place for dealing with MSW, including plastics.

 

Incineration can be used with recovery of some of the energy content in the plastic. The useful energy recovered can vary considerably depending on whether it is used for electricity generation, combined heat and power, or as solid refuse fuel for co-fuelling of blast furnaces or cement kilns. Liquefaction to diesel fuel or gasification through pyrolysis is also possible (Arvanitoyannis & Bosnea 2001) and interest in this approach to produce diesel fuel is increasing, presumably owing to rising oil prices. Energy-recovery processes may be the most suitable way for dealing with highly mixed plastic such as some electronic and electrical wastes and automotive shredder residue.

 

Here is a chart showing the differing rates of recycling and incineraton:

Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009 July 27; 364(1526): 2115–2126.

doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0311.

Some interesting facts on recycling!

So as I was browsing around this weekend for more info on recycling, I came across a really neat site that has compiled a list of recycling facts. Some of the cool facts include:

• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours — or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
• We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda cans every year!
• The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
• The U.S. is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the world’s people generate 40% of the world’s waste.
• A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.

Knowing all these facts and many more from the website really put into perspective of how significant an impact we could make if we really ramped up our recycling. Check out the site for other interesting facts and motivation on why we should recycle.

Update: Looking around more sites I found a similar site to the one above. This site just has more interesting facts. Such as “It has been estimated that recycling, re-use, and composting create six to ten times as many jobs as waste incineration and landfills.” I wonder if the president knows that? Or, “Only 10 percent of the 140.3 million cell phones retired in 2007 were recycled.” Which then leads to an interesting fact; “Recycling one million cell phones allows 35,274 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold, and 33 pounds of palladium to be recovered.” Doing the math 75 x 140.3 million (140,300,000, but 75 lbs per million) equals 10552.5 lbs of gold!!! With gold trading at around 1400 dollars per ounce and 16 ounces to a pound. Thats 23,570,400 dollars going to land out of our pockets!

The Story of stuff: A visualized demo of were our earths resources are used.

This is a nice little drawn presentation of how consumerism, im guessing is driving industries to use too many resources and how we aren’t doing a thing to stop it. Although its alittle on the conspiracy side, it does do a good job of showing just how much raw material is used to create the everyday products we use. It also goes on to show how much waste is put into the process.  . Be careful though, as I said you have to take this video with a grain of salt,  again she does a good job of showing the system of how everything we use in our daily lives, but it gets alittle political. So try to focus on the system, not on what her opinions are.

Changing the cycle

Changing the cycle is about changing the way we treat our planet. My name is Greg, and I am a 21 year old student at SFSU, thats San Francisco State University. The drive behind this blog to try to find out how much trash ends up in landfills and how much is really being reused. I always find myself nowadays looking at what I am throwing away and thinking about where is this piece of trash going to end up. Most likely its going to end up in a landfill and take from a couple of years to possibly thousands of years to decompose. That means landfills are getting bigger and bigger and all the raw material that went into this piece of trash that just went into the garbarge is probably going to sit their for all eternity. Whats worse is when I see garbage on the side of the road, I wonder where is this piece going to end up eventually, the ocean is quickest answer I give myself. So to get to the point im trying to figure out why people put so much trash in the wrong place and what effects its having on the environment around us. Most importantly what can I or the average person do to help?