retired engineer, former sailor, off grid, gamer, in Puerto Rico. Moderating a little bit.

  • 46 Posts
  • 155 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle





  • There is a new process for treating wastewater sludge that destroys the microfibers, so that is good news at least. I think it may be expensive, of course. It is called “hydrothermal carbonization”. Basically put the sludge in a giant pressure-cooker and the heat breaks the plastics into carbon and some water-soluble residual molecules which can go back to the start of the wastewater treatment plant to be biodegraded. But like others say, the main source in general is tires - not sure if they know whether tire microplastics are the main source in agricultural land though.


  • In economic terms, nature is often referred to as an “externality” - meaning, as you say, things which do not appear on corporate balance sheets - that are unvalued. We have collectively recognized that clean water in rivers is something valuable to society, and converted the externality of “use the river to carry away the pollution!” and “use the river water to cool the process plant” into actual costs: not by making investors put their money into riverine systems for future profit, but by requiring permits which restrict what can go into or come out of the river. We can, and sometimes do, manage the land in similar ways. I advocate for it, but of course I get a little anxious about the details if it comes to MY land!

    I spent a couple of years in Guna Yala, the indigenous-peoples’ territory of northeastern Panama. The Guna people live in towns on islands just offshore of the coast, and they farm and hunt in the mainland forest. When a Guna family wants to grow crops, they go with a village chief to the forest area near the village and identify a piece of land that is suitable. The chief approves it and records the location, and the family has it for three years. They can cut trees, plow soil, plant whatever. After three years, they have to abandon it and nobody can use that land for three years.

    I feel very much that my land is not REALLY mine. I have stewardship. The people that had it in the recent past (20th century), did not treat it well and shame on them. But they are dead and gone, so they don’t care I guess. I am treating it better and someone later will probably be glad to acquire it because of the great soil, healthy and perhaps valuable tropical hardwoods, and well-connected ecosystem. I’ll be dead and gone so I won’t care. It is IMMEDIATELY gratifying to live in this place and see it heal and prosper and that is all the return on investment I could ask. But I would at least say they should give me a break on property tax for land I restore to forest (even food forest). Maybe I will donate it to the Nature Conservancy some day, to lock in the gains.


  • From the immortal Journal of Irreproducible Results, “The Data Enrichment Method”: “. . .its principal shortcoming is that before the enrichment process can be started, some data must be collected. It is quite true that a great deal is done with very little information, but this should not blind one to the fact that the method still embodies the ‘raw-data flaw’. The ultimate objective, complete freedom from the inconvenience and embarrassment of experimental results, still lies unattained before us.”




  • The article mentions hydrogen from electrolysis of water, but I think a bigger source in the future could be steam reforming of biomass. That is, when you heat biomass (plant matter, sewage sludge, maybe even municipal garbage) to about 300C in steam, the organic matter breaks down into simple molecules like hydrogen, carbon monoxide (highly flammable!), methanol, elemental carbon (biochar) and miscellaneous others. Some of those molecules can be recovered for important chemical feedstock (since we won’t have petroleum or natural gas as feedstocks anymore, right?), and the gas can be fuel.

    In the early days of natural gas use, towns would “reform” the methane (CH4) by reacting it with steam to make carbon monoxide (CO) and 3 molecules of H2 - a mixture known as “city gas”. It is not new technology.






  • The statistic of low Firefox use is based on accessing US government websites. Could it be that there is significantly LESS government site access by the population of users that prefer Firefox? As a corollary I recently read that game companies observed significantly HIGHER bug reporting from Linux users on Steam, not because there were more Linux-related bugs, but simply because that set of users were more likely to initiate bug reports. Of course Firefox is not Linux and Steam is not the world, but a statistic from a relatively narrow segment of the internet should not be assumed representative of the whole.



  • Biochar is such an expanding area of investigation, it would be difficult to write a comprehensive book at this point. Of course the root idea of partial-combustion to make soil amendment is well-enough known, but there is much being learned about how to alter the properties of the char by how the pyrolysis is performed. There is much to be learned about how much char to add and how to pretreat the char. Beside burning to make char, there are other ways it can be heated and those affect the type of pyrolysis products that form - molten salt, steam, and subcritical hot water are all gaining prominence. The management and use of the pyrolysis products aside from the char is also a complex topic.




  • I also recently read about “hydrocarbonization” which is another approach for pyrolyzing sewage sludge. Pyrolysis of biomass on a dry basis is often energy-intensive in part because of moisture in the biomass. Nowhere is this more relevant than with sewage sludge, which leaves a wastewater plant at only about 25% solids, typically (though it has a solid appearance like damp clay). If the pyrolysis is performed IN water (which means under pressure if one wants to avoid evaporating the contained water), it can not only still occur, but the water at high temperature and pressure is an active medium for converting some of the biomass into smaller organic molecules.

    Upshot is that there is quite a lot of work going on nowadays to be creative with biomass management - that seemed to be of low interest even a decade ago.



  • wrong, western philosophy is often based on dichotomies - something is either this or that, but it is more of an analytical tool (I am not nature despite that I am a part of nature). Eastern philosophies are often mystic, though there is western mysticism - that some aspects of existence are incomprehensible on a rational basis and therefore dichotomies are illusory. But such a perspective does not inherently make people better stewards of the environment - in fact they might conclude that their every action is “natural” by definition.