The Future of Recycling Plastics and Other Materials

From Trash to Riches, more or less

I just tweeted today how all the buried plastic trash in today’s time becomes a boon Rosella’s time. I based this tweet on an NPR article you can read about here.

The reason has to do with three realities:

1. Natural areas of oil as predicted dry up. This despite back in 1999 Discover magazine saying we will never run out of oil.
2. The space production of hydrocarbons from stored ice deposits in the asteroid belt, and other space locations, are more expensive to produce relative to the trash deposits.
3. Technological improvements in reclamation processes allow for cheaper handling, including the use of leased A-1 and A-2 android labor.

The draw back to the reclamation of these trash fields for raw plastics, and other chemicals and materials, is that they are inherently limited in supply. There are only so many locations on the Earth. And some by the time of the Great Melt and New Madrid Traps have become inaccessible, if not possibly lost.

The irony is the future use of plastics is integral to society just as it is today. It’s used in everything from medicine to physical hardware. It forms new compounds and integrated alloys, such as plasti-steel. This is because humanity developed a greater understanding of materials engineering during the Second Age of Humanity. We came to understand the manipulation of matter at the quantum level.

​But by the Third Age of Humanity, plastics are being formed from raw hydrocarbons found in space materials. The same is true for all of humanity’s material resources.

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Image- ​Part of a wall in the centre of Singapore, made out of plastic waste. A great idea however it really brought it home how biodegradable plastic is and how much of it we use on a daily basis., By Nick Fewings, Source Unsplash,  Unsplash License (Processed using Adobe Spark)​