7805 OK to get hot (do I need a heatsink)

In , F. Bertolazzi wrote in part:

How about combined cost of making new and disposal in landfills? It surely appears to me that recycling opponents don't like to count the cost of trucking recyclable trash to landfills, or the even greater cost of landfill dumping fees. (Landfill dumping fees are boosted by NIMBY types that oppose everything and the many those of the "greenies" that oppose too much of everything.)

There is also the matter that plastics are made from fossil fuels - non-renewable natural resources that are limited in supply and which have great demand. Recycling plastic trash or using it as fuel, as opposed to dumping it in landfills, will make a dent in the demand for fossil fuels.

For that matter, I think that paper and wood trash should be used as fuel (for electricity generating stations if nothing else) when recycling is less economically favorable than that.

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 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

electrolux found plenty

top photo.

it's possible that some other cause was putting all the chlorine up there but I have not seen any convincing arguments

on the other hand ignoring evidence is often profitable

what about composting?

looks like another straw-man to me

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?? 100% natural

Don Klipstein:

Just because it's clearly much lower than trucking separated garbage. I mean, recycling of non-metals is already so wasteful that this is a minor point.

You have plenty of land. In Europe we cannot afford landfills anymore.

Plastic, as paper, has a structure. The only way to change its shape is to grind it, obtaining a useless blob, or to use chemicals *really* bad. And/or a lot of energy.

Recycling that stuff is always economically (and thus energetically, therefore "pollutionally") disadvantageous. That's why they need incentives. From Government or from stupids.

When I was a joung socialist living in Va, I used to drive a 1 ton car up to the recycling depot (sponsored by the local council, since the land was leased for free) to bring some pounds of paper, glass and Al.

The depot manager once told me that the glass was taken (already divided by color and put in truck trailers ready to be towed away) for free, while, for having the paper removed, he had to pay with some of the money he got from Al.

I'm talking about stuff carefully sorted by idiots like me, already loaded in trailers, standing on "free" land. And the guy barely scraped a living out of that. I we would have given him what we spent in gasoline (not mentioning our time), I guess he would have made more money.

Chlorine in ionic compounds (NaCl) and nearly-ionic highly-polar covalent bonding (as in HCl) is not the problem here. NaCl and HCl are spectacularly hygroscopic. Moving air from surface level to tropopause level rather reliably causes cloud formation, so NaCl and HCl originating from the surface have extremely low rate of making it into the stratosphere.

On the other hand, organic chlorine compounds such as CFCs lack ionic or highly-polar covalent bonds, and are not hygroscopic but more inert. That allows them to waft up into the stratosphere, where they run into ozone, an extreme oxidizer that organic chlorine compound vapors are not inert to. Noted reactions include freeing the chlorine from carbon so that the chlorine is available for ozone destruction - as a catalyst, so that the chlorine keeps on destroying ozone until it (temporarily) wafts back down into the troposphere, or gets reacted into an inorganic compound that is hygroscopic and gets rained down from the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, it appears to me that stalling of worsening of the "ozone hole" since sometime in the 1990's and recently-prior-to-that growth of the "ozone hole" are in an anthropogenic cause-and-effect relationship. Other explanations have been searched for by opponents of manufacturing and using organic chlorine compounds, but I have yet to hear of any getting far.

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 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

The ozon hole could have been there for thousands of years, because it was found by the first satellite to be put up to search for it. Prior history is unavailable, and it is a bit un-scientific to assume that it happened to occur at the same time as that satellite went up.

How is it more expensive to drive a truck loaded with nothing but plastic bottles than it is to drive one loaded with unsorted trash?

USA has most of its population in regions as densely populated as Europe is. Along with plenty of NIMBYs.

Or melt it, since most plastics are thermoplastics, which are ones intended to melt by heating and mold into shape. This includes PET (recycling symbol #1), HDPE (recycling symbol #2), polypropylene (recycling symbol #5), polystyrene (recycling symbol #6), and LDPE (recycling symbol # either 3 or 4 IIRC).

How is this the same now, now that recyclable paper scrap is worth one or two hundred bucks a ton?

And if it is not economical to recycle paper scrap, why landfill it? A ton of paper has the same fuel energy as about 420 kg or a goodly

2.6-2.7 barrels of petroleum - which is worth about $220 FOB before any refining!

And how is today not different, now that in recent years minor shifts in petroleum demand have caused major shifts in petroleum price?

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 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

prior to the launch of the satwellites there's over 30 years of ground-based optical measurements.

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?? 100% natural

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Don Klipstein:

The local dump is, most of the times... local. The recycling plant not necessarily, practically never. The local dump "processes" every kind of garbage, the recycling plants are specialized for each type of rubbish. Even plastic bottles are of different kinds, requiring very different treatments: soda bottles are rather different from detergent or milk containers. A recycling plant must have a "critical mass", so it will require to gather stuff from a much wider basin, wile even a 10 people village can have its own, local dump.

Well, we have them here too, but they are also represented in parliament and/or affiliated to organized crime. Who do you think caused the Naples rubbish crysis?

I'm not sure about it, soda bottles are inflated, so the preformed mould must be perfect.

Anyway, you can recycle them only after you have collected and transported them, taken out the label and cleaned it from all residues. If it was economically (an thus ecologically) viable, someone would have done it. Here, charities collect PE plastic caps, much smaller but with a weight comparable to the bottles, small surface so there's not much goo to clean, and very compact and ship them to China (probably for free, containers must return somehow).

Where? At the recycling plant or in the middle of Arizona?

By all means. Incineration is the way to go.

Well, minor is probably not the best term, since China, that once was an oil exporter, has become one of the big importers.

Don Klipstein:

Sure, but 2/3 of the Earth is covered with salty water.

Yeah, I remember well that story, but there are also other known (and unknown) ways to reduce O3 to O2, including... doing nothing. The depletion may have been caused as well by a reduced production of O3

You don't get anywhere without funds. And why someone should fund a research that may tell us that we threw away our fridges because of stupid research? On top of that, all of the money for such research is being spent on falsifying data to demonstrate that there is a thing such as global warming. This is not surprising, given the fact that Mr Pachauri is on the board of countless industried that waste energy and materials to build "alternative energies" machinery.

In other fields, such as epidemiology, the funding is less biased, so, after 20 years, we get to know that Hinkley has a cancer rate below average. But Mrs Brockovich is not likely to return the $2.5M she stole, nor the rights on the movie, nor stop to make more money on her phoney environmental activism.

To paraphrase you, making up evidence is always very profitable.

What's that supposed to mea?, can the same logic be applied to smoke detectors?

That sure sounds like a conspiracy theory.

Are the residents of Hinkley still being exposed to hexavbalent cromium?

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?? 100% natural

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F. Bertolazzi:

research?

Stupid, or sponsored, or self-righteous, or exploited, as you prefer.

Sorry, I never meant to confuse you with Mr. Betts. But your support for what I now (at the time, published by SciAm, I bought it at face value) regard as the dress rehearsal of global warming confused me.

True, global warming was invented by Maggie herself, and it's only solution is atomic energy (possibly with fast breeders), but I refuse to willingly lie. Although it may be necessary, given the "empowered" plebs that votes liars.

Jasen Betts:

Uh?

Well, in this case, given the fact that there is an elite that studies impersctutable matters (they can't do a reliable one-week forecast of that chaotic system), headed by a less than spotless guy, a bunch of often yesterday's experts that either gains a lot (fame and money) or returns to the limelight, and seen the West Anglia e-mails, I may be tempted to think about such an occurrence.

As long as they don't inhale it. they're safe as usual.

I appreciate, truly, the fact thad you don't insist on lost points.

The satellite record goes back to 1979. The ozone was in fairly good shape from 1979 through 1981, then the hole worsened greatly after that until around 1993-1994 (those 2 years slightly worsened also by the Pinatubo eruption), and after that largely stabilized with a slight improving trend noticeably kicking in at 2007.

"Hole area" is defined as area having less than 220 Dobson units of ozone. Before 1979, there were ground-based measurements, though without the coverage of satellites. But absolutely none found less than 220 Dobson units anywhere at any time before 1979.

The ozone hole was announced in 1985, a somewhat bad year in the time when the ozone hole was rapidly growing.

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 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com, http://members.misty.com/don/index.html)

My experience from near and previously in Philadelphia: The landfills are now well out of town. There's even the matter of I-95 corridor high population areas exporting landfillable trash as far as into the Midwest. This leads to the complaint of trailers being used alternately to haul trash westward and goods such as food eastward.

The dump only 40 or whatever miles out of town charged something like $60-80 per ton nearly 15 years ago, probably significantly more now.

Philadelphia has in-town a sorting facility for recyclable trash. That plant sorts out the #1 plastic bottles (PETE, typically water and soda bottles) and the #2 ones (HDPE, which most milk bottles are).

Sorted PETE and HDPE have positive value. Heck, a ton of HDPE has as much fuel value as over 5 barrels of petroleum - I wish the NIMBYs and the greenies would not oppose an electric generation station fueled by HDPE trash. Just some engineering will make HDPE burn as cleanly as fuel oil can - the two are chemically very similar. For that matter, toss in the similar LDPE, close enough to identical to HDPE for fuel purposes.

Scrap price of recyclable paper, even corrugated cardboard boxes, in or within 10 miles of Philadelphia.

--
 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

The salt still has low rate of reaching the stratosphere 16-plus Km aloft where the ozone layer is. And for whatever any other reasons, it does not harm ozone the way organic compounds including chlorine do. A strong candidate reason is that Cl in NaCl sticks close to the NA, not prone to being liberated into free chlorine the way chlorine in chlorine-containing organic compounds is upon exposure to ozone and/or ozone-forming shortwave UV.

The production source is very short wavelength UV in or near the "vacuum UV" subset of the UVC range. The sun is reasonably constant with this, despite variability being a few or several times the variability of the "solar constant" (which has done a fairly good job of appearing to be constant +/- something like a part per thousand).

The ozone hole problem predated popularization of global warming.

There is also the matter that man-made global warming is for real, while it appears to me that IPCC "median track" (warming this century by

3 degrees C) overestimates this by a factor around 2. From now to 2035, it does appear to me that global temperature is likely to be about steady, fair chance very slightly cool, from AGW being borderline to slightly insufficient to overcome a likely ~30 year oceanic oscillation cooling trend and a "210-year-class" downturn in solar output likely to last about or slightly over 25 years, combined with climate sensitivity to solar variation appearing to me to be greater than to variation of greenhouse gases. This does not negate existence of man-made global warming.

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 - Don Klipstein (don@misty.com, http://members.misty.com/don/index.html)

Don Klipstein:

If the incinerator is placed downtown as in Copenhaghen or Brescia, you could also get free home heating and, with a little engineering, cooling.

Don Klipstein:

But, as you mentioned, things like Pinatubo can affect O3 production.

Maybe some El Ninho (just to throw in the name of a huge and only recently studied phenomenon) side-effect was to blow NaCl or particulates in the stratosphere. Did you know that the recent "melting" of the South Pole was due to its albedo reduced by the sand blown from Australia?

And anyway, given the huge amounts of CFCs used as spray propellant and PCB washing, did it make any sense to prohibit the usage for fridges and AC?

Sure. So nobody now makes more research in that field to double-check wether the CFCs were really the culprits.

Also it does not negate that global warming (if it really exixts) can have other and more important contributions, that fight it with carbon emissions certificates will be a bonanza for organized crime, that it may be a good thing, or anyway better than another ice age.

Landfills are a special case. They consist of large, high-grade deposits of every sort of raw material you need for a technological society. In a century or two, they'll all have been mined.

Lots of minerals are commercial in quantities of ounces per ton of ore, so landfills will one day be very attractive places to look.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

There are already landfills where they've dug methane wills and get enough to run a power plant big enough to meet all the electric needs of the offices and processing plants and schtuff.

Cheers! Rich