the pond

So enough with the formality of strictly historo-futuro geographics based blog, I’ll instead take a cue from the most excellent whiteness and forge right ahead. to start the mossy rock rolling I’ll focus on a few of my favorite familiar ideas that have been kicking around for awhile. In fact, some of you may have heard them, or versions of them so bear with me until I can venture out onto the thinner ice of newish thought.

Plastic Recycling Machine:

It has been proposed by Mr. McDonough and others that everything should either be a technical or biological nutrient. That is, everything should either go in the compost, or go in the recycling bin and be infinitely upcycled into new products. This is a great idea, and some things combine them. Witness the shoes that have wildflower seeds embedded in their soles and as the material is abraded away the seeds are scattered. (let’s make sure they’re native to where the shoes are worn!) Then there’s the tomato seed in the soda bottle where the bottle decomposes and provides all the nutrients to nourish the plant as it sprouts. Absolutely amazing ideas. So everything should become something else useful. No waste, basic stuff.

Now, consider for a moment all the plastic items we may be using every day. Coat hangers, dustpans, yogurt tubs, chip bags, sneakers, basketballs, fishing lures, shoe lace nubbin things, and of course nearly everything we buy comes wrapped up in layers and layers of oil’s stiff cousin, plastic. Some of it we recycle, milk jugs and their ilk. Some of it we donate to goodwill when we’re done, and some we just throw away where it’s buried with other stuff that’s immensely valuable just hard to use. But what if we kept all the plastic we got, and reused it on site, in our own home?

In many modern households there are a large number of hulking appliances. There are ones used to wash dishes, bake baked goods, clean clothes, tumble dry, or dispense ice cream. They’re common, relatively inexpensive, and we have that formula down. Most people in the industrialized world are open to purchasing, owning, and using large appliances. precedent! I think there should be another appliance to buy. A sort of mash up between a recycling bin, an oven, and a 3-D printer. All the plastic items we’re done using can be fed into this machine, where they’re melted down and used again to print out new objects. Anything we want! There could be a programmed library of presets, everything from cups and bowls, to pieces of a chair that you just bolt together. Heck, you could print out enough bricks and make a house! Or you could print out a record! Just think, clean, freshly pressed vinyl in minutes. Then when you were done with an object, feed it back into the appliance and make a brand new thing

Of course you’d have a constant influx of new plastic items into your possession and there’s the possibility that your input would exceed your output. Simple! Just recycle excess at the curb like you do now, or print out new shoes and give them away to people without shoes.

Clearly there are obstacles to the implementation of this idea. Namely, all plastic items would have to be made of the same stuff, and that stuff would have to be easily melted and used in 3-D print nozzles. But the technology IS there, we have 3-D printers, we have plastics that can be easily recycled, we have it all. and I think it would be fun.

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