So Many Recycling Things #01

Some World Recycling Projects #1

... and some commentary by me

NEEDS A LINK TO BFZCB biobots story (Mon 23rd)  near first intermission

It seems there are millions of environmental disasters these days. I was looking for a few things to brighten my day instead of doomscrolling. And I came across two videos on Youtube that showed me that some projects are actually recycling and making great new products. They were the Business Insider World Wide Waste series season 1 and season 2 marathons. 

(WARNING: These two videos are over four hours long between them. And if  - like me - you're interested in seeing some good news, then that four hours takes six hours with breaks to take notes, make cups of tea and coffee, and chat about it. And then I wrote a Conclusion.)

I've split this into a series of three articles because one would far exceed my preferred range of article lengths. I'll post one a week from now on, and if you're up for it, the first two articles are written pretty much as I was watching the videos, then re-watching them to flesh out my notes.

As usual, the 'notes' ended up being wild ideas fired back and forth, and here are a few of the best ones, so if you're game to fall down the rabbit hole with me, come for a romp through four hours' worth of engrossing videos:

Season 1:

Business Insider World Wide Waste series season 1 - watch the video here, and the sections below follow the order that they appear in the video.

Chopsticks Recycle

It's beautiful. Hot damn it's lovely to look at and I'd love a recycled chopstick panel for a feature wall in the house. And yet it's sad that there's this waste is a problem in the first place, so I reckon the primary aim of these products should be to make people aware of the mess their choice to use disposable cutlery makes. 

And perhaps cities should impose a cost on that convenience, to maybe curb the problem at the source.

Maybe though there's a bit of sun shining through - those chopsticks are either made of wood or bamboo after all, and both do decompose quite well naturally. Also as observed in the segment, one can ask for them NOT to be included in one's meal. 

There's also a tiny bit of shade to cast, too - and that's because of the resin. Because the product shouldn't just randomly decompose and leave you without a feature wall,  it's introducing a new long-lasting thing, but one that'll enter the waste stream eventually.

So right there, in the first video of the first season of the show, is the one standout rule that needs to be emphasised: Almost all waste is down to 'convenience.' I'd also like to say that the idea of convenience really only took hold in the Plastic Age after the Eight Hour Day was first introduced. 

Sorry for a sidetrack right off the bat, but: Before the Industrial Age, before the Eight Hour Day, there were just "days." And you spent your 'days,' in 'living.' People got up, ate something if they had it, went off to find more. Whether they did that by foraging or hunting or growing it. And in between, they rested or played. The whole notion of an eight hour day or convenience would have seemed silly to them. Yes there were always a few people with 'convenience' due to positions of wealth and/or power but it wasn't anywhere near as ingrained as it is in the present day. When industrialisation took hold, people were needed to work in time-ordered shifts. You had to get up to do a whole other kind of day. Before, even if you were a farmer or hunter or gatherer, you could pick your times of day to do stuff, and while it sort of depended on predators and prey and seasons and so forth, it wasn't set in stone. That held true for a lot of the time up to the Industrial. But then things changed, and if you weren't there at the start of the day's shift well you might lose that work, and so time became important. After almost a century of that, you heard that not everyone had to work from sunup to sundown and never have time with the family.  The eight hour day was a lot of things. It was the beginning of a more fair system of exploitation, a way to manage that whole slippery 'shifts' thing - and the start of a thing called 'convenience.' You got eight hours to sleep, eight hours to work, and eight hours of leisure time. And by thunder, you weren't going to let small things like cooking and laundry get in the way of your leisure time. So it was 'convenient' to spend less time buying food and cooking it, it was 'convenient' to not be building your own furniture in your leisure time.  Of course, that was also 'convenient' for a growing commercial sector that found that econiomies of scale meant they could pack more customers through a single shop that sold more than just a limited range of stock, that they could make your 'convenience' meals also 'convenient' for them by packing them with preservatives so they could make them in huge batches and sell them in months.  And plastic was 'convenient' for everyone all around. Until now. . . Anyway - convenience should always have cost more than it does and yet it never did. Put it on the planet's tab. . .

Back to the video.

Flower Incense

Really nice way to make use of a waste stream that's quite significant and localised to India - I like incense anyway, and this is a good way to turn flowers that would otherwise just add to the toxic overload entering the river into a new product that gives employment as well. 

We're strange, we create religions and belief systems and then blindly follow them into potential disasters and danger. Even polluting that deity's sacred river . . .

Avocado Plastic

Avocado (and other biomass-based) plastics bring me to another thing - plastic does come from organisms. Whether that comes from fossil fuel oils or the oils of "OI! I'm not quite fossilised yet!" organisms like avocado stones or algae, it's a bit ironic isn't it that we make utensils out of ancestors and contemporaries? 

And especially with fossil fuel based products, I always have this urge to blame it all on "The Curse Of Digging Up The Ancestors."

But back to the plastics themselves - it's pretty wonderful that we can make even slightly more biodegradable plastics with younger biomass. It's always going to be a fine line between the end product decomposing as you're carrying your food to your table, or taking a hundred years to decompose under natural conditions. 

Luckily, we do have enzymes that are crazy for specific varieties of plastics including avocado plastic et al, and they only need a relatively mild temperature to become activated and digest those plastics - and energy is becoming cleaner and cleaner and cheaper and cheaper all the time, so this is going to be a much more attainable goal as time passes.

Speaking of which, I've got a story in the works about energy, heat, and getting rid of  heat from the planet. Keep an eye out - or better still go to the footnote and subscribe to the newsletter and be informed when it comes out.

Algae flip-flops

Or as we Aussie like to call them to the amusement of the rest of the world, '"Thongs maaaate!"

These are a GREAT idea, and I support the idea. I think they're not exactly high fashion nor really good safe footwear but I do reckon they have a place in the world of footwear. 

The family of algae are some of the best biomass generators in the world and we should be using them a lot more, both as a raw material and as a food. Spirulina is an acquired taste - but so are eggs, beer, insects, and cilantro. And I can grow spirulina in old PET bottles if I have a mind to, and then eat it or experiment with it. I've used culinary spirulina and quite like the seaweed/marine flavour it has. Maybe a series of thing I'll try with algae is forthcoming. Hit me up in the footnote if you like the idea, hey?

Vegetable Biogas

The difference between burning biomass and digesting it into biogas is actually quite a thing. If you just burn biomass, it creates the heat energy, yes. But also digestion creates gas which is easily directed indoors to a cooking or heating device and there it burns without as much black carbon being released. 

And it creates fermentation heat locally, meaning if you situate the biodigestor in your greenhouse you can warm that too as a byproduct. Keep the worst of the frosts off, save your seedlings, keep a productive vegetable production going. If that's your bag.

Biodigestion also creates a sludge that you can use directly as a fertiliser and thus sequester the carbon, or you can dry it and use it, or heat it a bit more to create biochar, which also improves soils and soil fertility, and also sequesters carbon back in the soil where it belongs.

Mushroom Mycelium Products

It has to be said here (and I know myself - I'll probably come back to this point again and again) that is that mushroom mycelium is never going to taste like bacon - so stop calling it that and proudly call it by a non-meat name.

I'm not a vegan or vegetarian but I don't turn my nose up at any culinary experience, and even mycelium has a nice mushroomy flavour you don't need any fake flavourings to make it the star of a meal. 

The cool thing here is that they've worked out how to grow mycelium to order as it were, and from there all the uses for that mycelium are great. Once again and for heaven's sake, it does NOT have to be called 'leather' either - it's a product in its own right. And texture it to look like nothing else before it ever has - make it stand out. 

A big tick from me though - and probably an even bigger tick from that crocodile or snake that didn't end up as leather. . .

Banana Textiles

As the article notes, banana fibres are strong, beautiful, easier to dye (and thus needing less dye) and have been around for a long time in many cultures.

One common thread I often see, and which is also a result of the 'convenience' and 'economies of scale' era we're in, is that some small businesses want to 'grow the business.' They don't seem to see the irony of that, which is that it makes their eco-friendly project into a new corporate monster in its turn. 

So it's good to see many of these small businesses that are happy to just make 

Also, and as pointed out in an episode in the second season, clothes should be valued and kept by their owners, not be a throwaway item. So these smaller manufacturers should sell the product for what it's worth and not aim for parity with the mass-produced garbage. 

Bread Crumbler

Now we're getting to a subject close to my heart (and stomach, and soul, and very being) which is this bread crumbler machine. From my Austrian beginnings I remember real bread dumplings of flour and old dry bread, made by my Oma Mitzi and by my parents. 

I like using breadcrumbs in my cooking and while I've never thought to use them to extend flour in baking I can see that it's a natural holdover from the thrifty (for lack of a better polite word) origins of modern bakers. 

And I can almost taste that recycled bread and I can tell you that - in my 'mind's mouth' - it'd be tasty as. I'll definitely consider this and will probably experiment with it in my baking at some stage.

For now I just want to add that dried bread is also a worthwhile thing - teething rusks used to be just bread that was sliced and cut into 'soldiers' and then placed back in the oven to dry out. 

When I make bread dumplings and don't have dry bread, I put stale bread in the oven and let the oven dry it out the day before. Then I discovered large mason jars and now I can make big fluffy lovely bread dumplings any time I want . . .

And I'm just saying, but - once the baking's done for the day would be a great time to put in chunks of yesterday's bread and dry it right out, bakers. And if packed airtight you could sell 'dumpling bread chunks' all year round. Are you hearing me bakers? 

Sliced breads, French breads, heavy rye breads - these are all great to use in dumplings and will also keep for months if kept airtight. Don't change your thrifty ways, bakers!

E-Waste Recovery

LINK GOES DOWN HERE

This was interesting - I've just done
>>>several stories about biobots<<<
 that should in theory be able to tag specific materials, about bacteria and enzymes that make short work of plastics. And then these videos came along and now I can confidently say that I won't be doing any e-waste recycling projects - no home based industry can match the technical sophistication of this operation. 

That said I'd love to have the gear to do this a there's a lot of money in metals recovery and that would finance my projects to make induction furnaces, presses, injection molds, and filament extruders. . .

(Note: I also blog about small and tiny scale recycling and when I come up with new techniques, new simple adaptations of existing domestic utensils and gadgets that we may already own, or any other useful info, I make it available on one of these blogs or in other places online. See the footer for how to find out more.)

Pineapple Plates

Once again with the bioplastics (although as I mentioned fossil fuel based plastics are technically still bioplastics) and this time with a twist - embedded seeds. Must admit mixed reactions.

On the one hand, they are great for using a resource that's otherwise not easy to use. (Well, I can offhand think of a few like stock feed, stock feed additive, fattening food for livestock, digestibility bioimprover, biogas,) On the other hand, attaching potentially invasive species seeds to the plates so they can claim the novelty factor. No. Just no. 

If they must spill their seeds upon the ground then make some long strips that have seeds spaced at the right distance and with particular seeds, sell them as a garden supply. Print advertising for these strips on the backs of plates, and ads for their plates on the underside of the seeding strips. Sheesh is that not better than bobby trapping their plates with biohazards?

Mushroom Final Exit

This one, hmmmmmmmm. . . On the one hand it's such a cool idea, on the other they look absolutely wonky and fully dodgy. And I just can't forget that we buried our dead to prevent animals from eating the corpses. . .

On the plus side the mycelium and moss just snack up all the heavy metals and other stuff we decompose into that isn't all that eco-friendly, and so our passage back into Earth is not traumatic for the planet. (For instance, all the microplastics that we ingested in our lifetime. But that's for another article, hey?)

"Bottlecap" (actually "ringpull") handbags

It's an elaborate process for a very limited portion of the waste stream and with appeal to a small group of clients, but if it makes people more aware of recycling then it's worth every penny. 

And actually, art like this should cost a bit. It provides employment for people, it will look good, and eventually those ringpulls will still get to the smelter anyway. 

Things like this are good for small groups to get into and raise recycling awareness in their locale.

Clothing "Recycling" 

... surely you can see that we've attained wan-...  - err, sorry, warp - factor nine? This is a waste, a travesty, and a greenwash. It's a cynical attempt to extract multiple incomes out of each item of clothing. There are honest efforts out there to extend the life of clothing (like Fixing Fashion) and any of the methods outlined there is better than the rubbish in this episode.

Also there's the attitude of fast clothing companies like H&M that say they won't back down and they intend to continue to pump out a significant waste stream and that kind of says it all for these large corporations doesn't it? Scuse me while I almost swear - but eff them. No wonder H&M got unceremoniously rejected in China recently. 

Artificial Reefs 

Could have been a good thing if they'd asked a scientist and listened to them when they'd have (inevitably) said not to use stuff that'll do more harm than good. Adding in dead people and making money off their families was a nice touch but somewhat overshadowed that they didn't offer to sink a second reefball for each burial. What? They said that they'd never even supply 1% of the habitat needed, surely they could show some social and ecological conscience too?

IKEA Waste / Recycling Mall

I've lumped these two together because. Because they're next to each other, they have similar aims, and similar methods.

Now do excuse me but does anyone think this is taking away the income of various charities? Shop owners in a mall have outgoings to pay so they can't afford to be too generous with low prices. Usually the people that need repaired furniture also need that lowered price.  

So is it just a boutique for pre-loved items for better-off people? I guess I can see a sort of function for such a mall and I do hope they take off everywhere and are always supported by local government, state government, and even federal government. 

Aside from the obvious benefit of recycling furniture and keeping it out of the waste stream, it does provide employment, and in the local charity opp shops in my area at least, provide a generally close and friendly social work environment for people who may have difficulty entering the workforce.

I hope that any similar concept malls will ensure that they can operate with economy, accept a large workforce, and that mall management can step in occasionally and can apply a small discount for a shop holder's rent if they provide cheaper priced items for someone truly struggling that needs them. 

Algae Blooming Algae

Seaweed and feet again. . . Still cool uses of these little powerhouse algae. Also - I'd rather have a neobioplastic (I sooo wanna copyright/trademark that word...) than a thanatobioplastic (and this one! ...) to decompose after a product reaches the end of its lifespan. 

Such dense foam materials can be used in a variety of purposes other than just footwear, and between algae based and mycelium based materials we have a very good case for kicking polystyrene foam (tradename Styrofoam) to the kerb as a packaging material. 

Also there's an opportunity for some enterprising souls to make molded shock-absorbing packaging from cardboard and paper papiér-maché packing. These days you can make 3D printing stock material from something like polypropylene (PP) and making hard molds custom-fitted for items and stamp out papiér-maché packaging. Does this give anyone any ideas? Hmmm... 

Intermezzo #1:

Om Nom Nom popcorn! See you next week!

Season 2

Business Insider World Wide Waste series season 2

Plastic Bricks

I saw this almost a year ago and was impressed at the enterprise and had my few thoughts. Unfortunately (and unavoidably) the process releases fumes because the plastics are heated to very high temperatures, and there should really be a huge charcoal filter to draw those fumes out of the air. But as the purpose is to nail down plastic that would otherwise be in landfill . . .

. . . and yeah, there you have the other issue - it's still being disposed of in landfills, just right on the surface not buried. As mentioned in the article, this is not the ideal solution as abrasion from vehicle tyres still creates microplastics, there's one more ray of light on the horizon: electric vehicles are a bit lighter on roads than fossil fuelled vehicles because light weight equals more range out of a given battery capacity - and EV manufacturers really want to alleviate range anxiety

So a mixed thing for me. Combine their materials (prepared with lower temperatures so it's not so toxic) with Precious Plastics' sheet press and you could create a very durable flooring material for foot traffic areas. Tempting, anyone? 

Butte toxic lake, waste rock, remediation

This comprises two episodes, one focusing on the birds and one on Butte itself. As they're part and parcel related I've lumped them together in this entry.

The lake produces a small tourist income, yep. But it comes at the expense of continuously exposing migrating birds to sulfuric acid, and not on actually remediating the lake or the town as the mining company should. It's just a sop, an appearance of doing something

The town is built on 'waste rock' which is poisoning the soil, and covered in half a metre of soil - why not force the company to strip back the topsoil, put the waste rock into the lake to slowly fill it up over a decade or two? And then properly fix the soil this time? 

And while you're at it, all that recovered, mixed, and not useful for precision applications plastic from a few episodes back - why not use them to make a series of cylinders the size of 200L (44gal) drums, and float those on the surface of the lake to scare birds off? 

Then as you tip more rock in, the drums get confined to a smaller and smaller area and finally you break them up and burn them for energy.

The important thing to realise is that if the people minding that lake had a different guaranteed income such as a Universal Basic Income (UBI) they'd still come there because they enjoy it. 

Also know that if  Arco (the current owner of the Anaconda mine property) were to really pay for real remediations  they'd be circling bankruptcy and trying to pay almost as much as the mine's profits over its entire operation.

We need to start realising that money is at its basis a fiction, and worth nothing in the face of the disasters we're about to encounter. 

Vegan Leather.

They call this great material 'leather' but it's better than leather, it deserves a better name. And to see it with stamped-on snakeskin or alligator embossing seems depressing. Instead of 'leather' maybe find a unique name like 'appeel' (- heck, come on! People got away with the name naugahide for heaven's sake -) and pattern it to look unique and new. Make it stand out. 

This material needs to be more publicised. Ask any alligator or snake. 

Plastic Bag Kicks

This does get soft (LDPE, Low Density PolyEthylene) out of the waste stream. For a while, until the shoes are thrown out. Which is better than a blowing wasteland of discarded plastic bags. 

Also good is that they use a polyester canvas made from PET bottles for the uppers. So is the fact that even if the shoe has to be recycled it's now a dense mass of LDPE and PET rather than paper-thin sheets and bottles.

One thing that's a bit less appealing is that trend I've mentioned already, to embed seeds in everything and call it green when in fact in some ecosystems it could become an invasive weed. I wish they'd stop doing this. . .

Wind Turbine Recycling

Wind turbine blades are, as admitted in this episode, only going to form 1% of waste in another decade or so. And now comes a tentative nibble at some of the larger issues, as alluded to in my very early sidetrack.

Firstly, we need to need less energy. That's problematic already and only going to get worse as we transition to electric transportation and as global temperatures necessitate more cooling but with some new technology on the horizon, it's going to be attainable.

Secondly, There are a couple of other uses for these blades than just burning them for energy and two are shown, but the internal details of these blades wouldn't be common knowledge, which might account for there not being more uses for them. 

Just in the few seconds here I thought of two, three, or four identical blades set vertically in foundations and supporting something like an observation platform over a wildlife park or natural scene.

Or (wild idea being thrown out here) three, arrange in a teepee formation and skinned with recycled plastic panels and recycled wood interior, use it as the tourist centre at a wind or solar farm or some recycling operation. Great publicity! 

Recycled Polystyrene

It's a dangerous plastic as it's toxic when burned or overheated and is flammable, but I'd rather see it in solid chunks than lightweight fluffy packaging (SINGLE USE!) and insulation. (Which it's good at but not the ideal solution.)

It can be broken down by mealworms into - well, mealworm poo - which is safe to use as a soil for crops. A pseudomonas type bacterium can convert styrene oil into a biodegradable plastic. So it can be broken down.

It produces horrible smoke when burned and it catches fire easily. It melts just above about the boiling point of water. 

In dense (unexpanded) form it is sometimes used to make plastic cutlery and yoghurt tubs and similar, but with the low Tg (Glass Transition Temperature aka softening/melting point) I might prefer other cutlery. And anyway - disposable convenient cutlery is bad. Right? 

I also remember that I had several plastic models as a kid that were made from PS and the glue was horrible stuff that gave me headaches unless I kept a window open. 

So these guys might just be the saviours of the Revell model lineup...  

Lavender Soil Rehabilitation

Lavender is a cash crop that grows in poor soils, but so does mallow. And I realise that (given how we still believe that money and 'the economy' are important) making some income from the remediation seems to be important, but believe me, it isn't. 

That's why I can see that growing a culinary product in polluted soil seems to be the only way out of this, but perhaps there's a clever dodge going on here.

The mining company is held responsible for the remediations. And for damages arising. But they've now seemingly offloaded some of that responsibility to the organisation in this episode. 

And the lavender must be drawing out toxins and metals from the soil. Since the plants can't magically make that disappear, it's still in them.

Then parts get sold as essential extracts and culinary herbs. When the inevitable poisonings and issues arise from ingesting all of that, who is now responsible for damages? The original mining company, or the people that are selling the product?

The trouble with this scenario is that it seems far-fetched and Machiavellian. Until you look at the track records of big corporations . . .

Refrigerator Recovery

It's another good effort. Cleanly draining refrigerants is - well, to do anything else would be beyond just common criminl and into super-villain level crime. So identifying the gases and sending them to be destroyed if they're CFC based and re-using them if they're still legal to use, is a good way to deal with this toxin. 

The description of how the illegal gases are destroyed, also points out how enough energy can disassemble anything. Remember this whenever someone says that a particular material is too difficult to neutralise and decompose quickly. 

Energy is becoming cheaper and cheaper both in monetary and environmental terms, and there are now also technologies that promise to deal with the heat problem. Go to the footnote and subscribe to the newsletter for the article that I'm currently researching about this. 

The inslulation. Powdered, it can probably be put in road mix just as much as any other plastics can. Failing that, it too is susceptible to large amounts of energy to burn it back to base elements.

Shampoo Bars

Shampoo bars are a good idea. That is all. Think how many shampoo bottles hit the waste stream every day, and while those may be HDPE and LDPE (High Density PolyEthylene and Low Density PolyEthylene) and very recyclable, it's still another waste to corral and wrangle, so shampoo bars in paper packaging are a good direction.

Carbon Tiles

As I watched this I realised that here was a thing that at its basis went back to artisans thousands of years ago - when having a tiled floor was a symbol of wealth, a useful way to prevent the soil under where you lived from shifting, and a more easy to clean floor.

These tiles don't need kiln firing but instead use a press and water curing process. That alone means they are eco-friendlier than ceramic tiles that do need firing.

And I wish large companies making ceramic tiles would undertake to make such tiles - but without the inevitable shortcuts those large companies make, without themselves becoming a source of pollution.

And I wish people understood that such flooring isn't a given, and isn't even necessary. I'm also thinking that waste-consuming technologies like those plastic/sand pavers should be developed into a system for making tile flooring that can be used in houses in place of the tons of environment-damaging concrete.

Think about this: Laminated wooden flooring is better for forests and the environment, yes. But it's made with epoxies and resins that aren't as friendly. And of course you're again skating that thin line between durability and decompose-ability. 

So more projects like this please. 

Food Waste Compost

All food waste recovering systems are good in my book. The only thing better than turning food into compost and/or biogas is if the food is caught at the stage before it becomes unfit for consumption and given away / distributed / turned into a more durable food product that can be distributed to those in need. Go for it!

Cigarette Butt Re-use

Here's a thing that's kind of cool. The gathering of cigarette butts for the filters which are then cleaned and made into a fluffy filling for teddy bears and soft toys.

But as that item says, the filters contain heavy metals. I'd want to know for sure that they were really really clean before I bought one of the teddies but there's so much more that gets recycled from a simple cigarette butt that it's an eye-opener.

The paper, still having nicotine in it, is turned into mosquito repellent sheets and I think I'd prefer that to malaria or dengue fever so this too is a brilliant adaptation to get every bit of use out of the resource.

It's all a good and fairly thorough use of every part of the resource, and all production operations could learn something from small operations that are this thorough.

Luxury Plastic Bags

This goes right up there with the plastic bag kicks and general plastic recycling. Anything we can divert from the waste stream until technology and energy come up to the point where we can decompose the plastics back to base elements, is good. 

Also, just like the ring-pull bags, they allow a story to be told, an awareness to be created. Keep the processes clean, keep up jobs, and make sure people that buy them come away impressed at how much can be done with the things that we currently, thoughtlessly, throw away.

Christmas Trees

Every year a sizeable portion of the world's population holds a religious festival that I reckon causes more pollution in a few weeks than we make for the next six months. (BTW I'd welcome anyone that has figures for this to contact me. Use the Contact Me link just a short way down in the footer and let me know.)

Knowing that the trees that are grown specifically for this festival and then become waste, this use of them is a bittersweet thing. It's lovely that they end up naturally decomposing back into the ecosystem and providing shoreline stabilisation as well. Also, these live trees still have a smaller carbon footprint than plastic trees.

And I realise that the trainee pilots would probably fly just as many hours on exercises as they do when using the trees for practice, so I'm okay with it because it repurposes two things, pilot time and ritual objects. 

EV Batteries

This is actually one of the episodes I had the most issue with. Car batteries were an issue - once. Then the industry realised what an almighty muckup lead actually was, and within a few years lead became one of the most recycled resources on the planet. 

Mild prevarications aside, the out and out scaremongering: ". . . and sometimes . . . . . . . . lithium batteries . . . explode . . ." has to be one of the most cringeworthy things that I've ever seen. Even when the series was aired, the problems had been mostly ironed out, and - especially in the EV battery industry - it became a non-factor in buying an EV. 

The company being profiled in this episode could have possibly done a bit more towards actually recovering lithium from the batteries, but okay - there's still more research than actual lithium recovery going on, and it's still early days. 

The video also shows people manually opening an EV battery pack and implies that EV battery packs are that difficult to recyle - but most often these aren't opened like that for scrapping, but for possible reconditioning. I'd rather see battery packs recycled by hand because it'll lead to more of the materials being recovered.

And in any case, EV batteries aren't a huge component of the battery waste stream. Worldwide only 9% of Lithium Ion Batteries ("LIBs") get recycled and the rest go to landfill, and almost 100% of these LIBs are cellphone, power tool, laptop, and similar devices' batteries. 

EV battery packs still aren't so commonplace that they just get thrown out wholesale, because as mentioned a few paragraphs back they can be reconditioned, and of most battery packs only a relatively small number of cells are faulty so EV packs are still treated as a valuable resource.  

Also before I close this segment I'd like to mention home solar batteries, which are also starting to enter the battery waste stream. We do need more research into recovering the elements of LIBs.

Summary

There were a few cons - as in conniving, 'con-artist' and not contra - in the series. I counted about half a dozen of those, and suggest we make the best of those by using them to disseminate information about sustainability, cradle to cradle circular materials management, and recovery.

Several more were well-intentioned but poorly executed and/or generated almost as many problems as they solved.

Rather a lot of the enterprises were hampered because no corporation or government wants to chip in and help grow them, and sometimes that's just general inertia but sometimes it's because to admit there was a problem would also mean having people make the connection that that particular governmet or corporation is responsible for the issue being recycled, and they are the kinds of eco-disasters that come with lawsuits and class actions attached...

There are as I've mentioned a range of technologies now being developed and available for managing heating and energy in sustainable ways. Our task is to balance these in ways that do the least damage to the planet and restore as much as possible of it. But to keep in mind that proper and specifically targeted application of energy is a solution to many of the issues developed in these three articles. 

Being Earthlings and Stewards of the planet

Using the term 'family' in taxonomy (as in referring to 'the algae family' earlier on) should tell us something - we're not humans and apes and monkeys and fungii and lichens and trees etc - we're EARTHLINGS and we need to start thinking about ourselves in that light - pretty much right now.

If we'd never lost that sense of stewardship due to 'convenience' and economy, our planet and our extended family would never have gotten into the state it's in now. Economy of our efforts (== 'convenience' ) made survival sense in the past but no longer does. 

We need to have less 'convenience' and pay far more for what convenience we do have. But see this next paragraph or two.

UBI (Universal Basic Income)

Maintaining 'wealth' was a good survival buffer but again it makes no sense in the current era. Keeping that wealth from 'subclasses' may have made sense when masses of rapidly breeding people had no access to education and had to be controlled, but in this day and age, education (which IS now available thanks to online video and lessons and freely available) should now be available to all.

(IDEA: Maybe instead of that much-vaunted 'social credit' or 'carbon credit' as a world currency should be also include 'education credit'  and be capped at some sensible level.)

The point is that if we shared things the least bit equitably, almost everyone on the planet could live well enough. The 'Middle Class' deomgraphic that came about last century and the century before, are now only one step up the wealth ladder from homeless refugees and in fact a few of the middle class will also become climate refugees in a really short time frame. 

As far as that goes a UBI could become a given in under a month- as long as everyone got one. Including people right at the top, the 1% of the 1% that own 80% of the wealth of the planet. You can see where the problem is going to lie, can't you? 

So-called "eating the rich" doesn't mean cannibalisation. It means persuading or legislating those with the wealth to redistribute it. There's a growing trend among billionaires to give most of their wealth away, and this is a good thing and a bad thing. 

Footnote:

In addition to writing these articles I'm also experimenting with ways of recycling waste that can be done at the cottage industry or community hub levels, not so much because it'll magically convert 100% of local waste into recycled useful articles, but because people who are doing these sorts of activities are likely to talk about them to people in their community, and so raise even more awareness of the issues and dangers.

So please - if you can at all spare some time, take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; And take some time and share the links to the News Stand and this article with your friends and readers. 

Take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information; 

Or maybe contact me via the webform; 

You can also donate either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there.

All donations are put towards keeping these websites online, and for developing devices, machines, and techniques to easily and safely recycle materials on a tiny scale.

How To Keep Customers

 Or, How Not To Lose Them

Sometimes, the irony just writes itself, sometimes the line between a truth and a satire is very faint. . .

This Will Be A Short Post

I don't run a business anymore, but I still subscribe to the odd newsletter from business 'gurus' and SEO tutors and website design - after all, there's no harm in keeping up with these trends. So this newsletter was about making websites for clients and said something along the lines of:

"Beware of promising much and delivering little."

No, really? Being dishonest about what you can and will deliver might be seen as a negative by your client? I'm not sure when actual delivered output stopped being the yardstick you'll be judged by. And even in the positively prehistoric times when I worked, there was always that business that promised jet airliners but ended up delivering a kite.

"Businesses have had it with bullshit promises. A bad reputation for under-delivering will really hurt your business."

Again. Say WHAT? Really? I never knew... If I'd known this back in the day, I could have been a good b2b in my time. (Hang on - I was . . .) 

Oh, and you realise I'm paraphrasing so you can't look this mob up, don't you? They still managed to even pussyfoot around those words of advice, I've condensed their vaporous BS into slightly solid chunks. 

But the solution to all your woes - apparently - is dead simple:

"Underpromise, then you'll look better and more honest."

I can't even. It sounds like a satire but sadly these people make their living giving business advice like that. . . "Lie to your client another way, and you'll look more honest." . . . Imma go out on a business guru limb here and say this:

"KNOW THY SHIT."

That should be the little motivational sign on your desk, above the smoko room hot water urn, and graven on your inner eye.

If you *know* your business, then you can tell the client what you can do for them and then do it. That's the best way I knew to keep clients coming back and I'm guessing it's still the best way.

That's it. If you have to learn some new aspect of the work on the job, tell the client and offer them a time discount to cover your learning curve. That's pretty much my advice. 

I'll also say that I think I do deliver, giving you articles that are worth reading, or that provide a smile, or tell you something new, or help you to get into recycling and sustainable energy and living.

So please - if you can at all spare some time, take a look at my News Stand where you'll see live updated links to everything I publish; Or get a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information; Or contact me via the webform; Or donate either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there. 

What Is Printed Circuit Boards Fatal Flaw?

Have We Hit Peak PCB? 

This person thinks it's coming close to that point, and asked the question of what will happen next. If you're the slightest bit techie you'll already have some idea where this is going, you folks may as well skip the next few paragraphs.

What Are PCBs And Why Are They Inadequate?

Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are those generally green or orange things inside devices that are studded all over with electronic components and gizmos, and they are one of the oldest pieces of technology in that picture. 

About a hundred and some years ago it was cool to just mount electronic and electrical parts (usually with some good stout bolts and pieces of varnished wood because those suckers were generally large and heavy parts) wherever and then string wire between connection points. (When a computer less powerful than a school calculator took up two rooms, you know that those components were huge, and the whole technology for mounting and connecting them in a space-saving way was still a ways off.)

A (sort of) timeline of printed circuit boards

If you've ever been fortunate enough to peer inside a really old 'parlor radio gramophone console' you'd have seen the next step - a sheetmetal chassis, with strips of insulating phenolic material with metal tags attached to them, and the components (that were by then several orders of magnitude smaller) would be soldered between tags, and then the wiring soldered from one tag to another to connect those parts to form the needed circuit. 

Then came the next thing, being able to affix thin copper sheet to insulating sheets and etch it to the shape the wiring would have to take, then soldering the components to the copper in their respective positions. In effect smushing all those metal tags and wires flat onto a piece of insulating material and so turning the old console into a smaller and much flatter sheet, with just a few wires going to speakers, lights, and controls. 

This was better (for the manufacturer) than the console because it did away with the cabinetry required, the sheet metal chassis that the tag strips were attached to, and reduced the size of the cabinet to a much smaller flat package that needed less wood and cabinetry craftsmanship, and the most important thing of all - 

* It was soooo much cheaper to print and populate that board than it would have been to assemble a hodgepodge of tagstrips and parts and metal cases and huge old wooden cabinets because you could mass produce the circuit boards by that stage, parts had become smaller and consumed less current, and technology hadn't stood still so there were ever more inexpensive PCBs, small components,  and cabinets. 

So that's a PCB and how it came about.

Now To That Inadequacy:

Parts became smaller and packed more circuitry inside them. That increased their current consumption again, but allowed the designer place more functionality closer together. To place them closer together, the copper traces ("tracks") had to be made thinner because there were physically just more tracks needing to be squeezed into each square centimetre to carry all the signals and power to those smaller parts, and thus they couldn't carry as much current, had signal bandwidth issues in some cases, and PCB designers began to need and use more and more layers. 

In re: layers. It's become an art form to place tiny little circuits on a PCB so that they occupy as little space as possible, (so the PCB will fit inside your fitbit or smart watch or mobile phone, for example,) and connect parts with best-path trace routing, and still be able to supply the needed current and signal clarity and still be useable. Some PCBs are now also flexible, meaning more design constraints and more demands made of the PCB technology.

Layer Proliferation

I and other hobbyists routinely use a software program that can create a design for a PCB that I can then either manufacture myself using quite old technology - or I can send it to a PCB manufacturer who can produce a small stack of boards for me for peanuts. 

But if I have a difficult design where a chip has fifty inputs, ten outputs, and needs two voltages, then I'm going to run out of board space pretty quickly and will need several traces to cross over each another - which is impossible on a single-layer board. Initially, the bridging was accomplished by ending the track just before it touched the conflicting track(s) and then resuming it on the other side, and bridging the two points with an insulated wire.

However, every extra bridging wire needed to be cut to size and involved two extra soldered joints to be made, and if you had more than ten of them it started to add up to a fair amount of operator time, and so there then arose a need to design in effect TWO boards that are perfectly aligned and place them on opposite sides of a single board so that the endpoints of traces where a trace needs to cross over aligned, then it can go partly on top and partly underneath and a single via connects the top and bottom traces at an overlap spot. 

A 'via' was just a hole drilled at the time the board was manufactured, and the hole copper-plated through during manufacture so that it joined the trace on one side with its continuation on the opposite side, thus skipping under the bridging point. When that wasn't enough commercial PCBs routinely had 3 - or more - many more -layers inside the board which is printed in a specialised process layer by layer, allowing a lot more wiring to pass by each other. Some computer boards can have more than ten layers sandwiched in them.

These issues - of having to make traces thinner and thinner to pack them in (both on each layer, and also because unless the alternating layers of a board are really thin then the board becomes a plank) and the parts needing more and more current necessitating thicker traces which is s direct conflict of requirements - have come together and resulted in PCBs rapidly becoming as unuseable as point-to-point wiring. THAT'S what that author was referring to, and it's about to become a real issue. 

Because Then Came The Limits

Even with all the design improvements of the PCB, limits are being reached, small complex parts with a lot more signal leads (a CPU chip in your PC or laptop can have 200 pins underneath it)  mean it's getting harder to get by even with twenty layers, and some tiny boards (think the battery charging circuit in your mobile phone) need to carry several amps of current on a PCB that's thin and compact enough to fit inside a device that has to fit inside your pocket. . . 

Making equipment point-to-point started off being sufficient but as components got more complex, this technique hit a wall where the wiring took too much space, too much time, and as parts got smaller, led to difficulties fixing parts in place against the wiring weight. It just got plain unwieldy.

Using sheetmetal chassis and tagstrips worked for simple circuits up the a certain number of components and also hit the wall. You can pack so many parts between tagstrips but then at some point it becomes impossible to add another part without colliding / shorting out / ridiculously long lead lengths.

Single layer PCBs were the undisputed king of the heap for a decade or two before they were replaced by 2 layer, and then multilayer - and nowadays also flexible foldable multilayer - circuits. And now that technology too is hitting the limits of what can be done.

My "What If" Moment:

About the late 1990s, the industry was just seeing the rise of FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) which were a logic chip that wasn't specifically set up to solve a particular problem but instead consisted of a chip that could be field-programmed to have certain logical parameters and which meant that you could in effect customise the chip to a task.

More recent versions offer a way to create specialised configurations that are less power-hungry for performing some specialised tasks faster than anything except a custom-manufactured chip. (And this is why FPGAs are so useful, having a custom chip manufactured was generally a long and expensive process.)

But in the late 1990s, another term was also trending - nanotechnology. Nanotechnology was promising to develop little machines and materials and revolutionise industries and our lives. Sci-fi authors had already foreseen them coming and posited the famous 'grey goo' idea and of course, I was hooked. 

Between those things an idea came to me, and while I like to think outside the box, I'm not the only one in the world that does this, and I've generally found that if I have an idea, several other people around the world have already had it or are about to. 

This is a technology which might well see the next step up in technology from the PCB. Nanobots are becoming ever more possible and they could in theory perform the internal programming functions of a FPGA only to a much greater depth.

I was envisaging a CPU all inside a single epoxy or ceramic block with only a handful of connections needed - power, inputs, outputs, and arteries. 

Whoa. Back up there - 'arteries?'

Yep. Imagine a device very similar to a FPGA but with added flexibility - it can actually remove sections of itself and replace them as required with different sections. The chip can grow itself both in the flat plane and in the vertical thanks to some light silicone oil inside it, and this 'blood' would carry a stream of nanobots from a materials area to the active area. 

The materials area would have a collection of circuit modules that perform logical functions, nanomaterials for connecting and affixing them physically, nanobots, and two areas that are isolated, one for inbound new materials and one for outlet of nonfunctional or outdated components, nanomaterials, and nonfunctional nanobots.  

In effect, the chip would be upgradeable just by injecting new modules and bots and clean silicon oil, and allowing all the wastes to drain out. In this way it would become like a living system, able to take in 'nutrients' and 'excreting wastes' and consuming energy to do so. Unlike any living system though, it would be able to alter itself to the 'environment' it found itself in. 

Put it in an aircraft and it could add Inertial Movement Units to become aware of 3D motion it undergoes, a series of input channels so that it could take signals from the aircraft's existing guidance systems, and outputs to operate that aircraft. It could download the Operation Manual for the aircraft and all relevant regulations and geospatial data for airports, and you'd have a plane that could fly itself. Add redundancy by using dual systems (and adding several redundant dual systems on hot standby) and theoretically you'd never have an operator-induced aircraft incident ever again.

Put such a system into a spacecraft with sufficient "sustenance" suspended in silicone oil and a supply of energy from solar panels and you could send this spacecraft to the next solar system to explore or become our ambassador. Put it into your home automation system and it will specialise itself for your house and your habits and your needs.

Exactly how it was going to do that was just a kind of 'black box' in my theory at the time, because while AI (artificial intelligence) was a sci-fi staple, the smartest thing around was a really stupid chat-bot whose name I can't even remember. Back then, this step of micromanaging the internals of the chip was the big stumbling block.

Possible? Maybe Not Back Then...

Only . . .  We now do have tiny prototype nanomachines that can be 'programmed' to do a particular task, we do have nanomaterials that make nanowires and building blocks possible, we can build chips in sections or in one assembly, and AI has taken some huge leaps forward and is now diagnosing patients better than a human, identifying faces better than a human can, and taking control over sensitive and finicky industrial processes far more accurately than a human. 

An AI can be programmed to run millions of combinations of molecules and look for potential drug cures for many ailments, they're performing better than humans at working on COVID vaccination variants and detecting COVID and cancers in xrays and predicting stock market fluctuations and predicting weather and . . .  

You get the idea - for a limited narrow process, AI performs extremely well these days. We could let an AI evolve this chip idea in a simulation, evolve the guidance AI that this chip would need, the processes for making the building blocks, and every other facet of producing such a chip. 

The easy part would be to get an AI to design a 'living chip' such as I've envisaged, and designing an AI to inhabit that chip. The hard part, to me, would be to answer the question "Should we?"

New Strange World

Hacktivism

Like it or not we're in "Interesting Times" indeed. . . The loosely-connected hacker activist collective known as Anonymous have been attacking Russian cyber properties wherever they can. Russian government Twitter accounts have been astroturfing fake news and propaganda items about the Ukraine. People who maintain 'open source' software modules and software suites have planted logic bombs in their software. 

Unfortunately sometimes this hacktivism has created problems for non-combatant computer systems, but I'm going out on a limb and say that there will always be collateral damage of some sort, and some companies really bitched but look - even I can see that there are going to be hacks and some of them might have unintended consequences and therefore I've got things as backed up as a private individual on a shoestring budget can attain. 

But I'll always back hacktivism because it's a popular vote rather than anything on Party lines, and besides, you need to be sure you're secure from ANY attack when your work involves data as sensitive and important as that supposedly was. 

The Guy Fawkes mask these days signifies Anonymous but they
took it as a symbol from the movie "V For Vendetta"
- which was about bringing down a Fascist regime.
Talk about relevant.

Also - and relevantly - since the attacks on Ukraine, it turns out that a lot of software has had updates hacked to damage Russian and Belarusian computer infrastructure. There purports to be a spreadsheet out there that details 20-something pieces of software that have had hacks introduced via the normal updates and that target Russian infrastructure. 

Back and Future

There are a lot more articles out there which undoubtedly bear on this post of mine - people using AI software to develop better weapons, others developing better and better deep fakes to propagandise one side or the other, and hackers outside the Anonymous collective are taking sides and are really fierce about their support of each side. 

There are definitely going to be collateral damages in that war. You or I or our neighbour may be affected by some hacktivism or similar, directly or as a result of that attack on another system we depend on. The best thing you can do is tinplate your arse. Make backups of anything important right now, any way you can and keep that backup safe. 

That complaint about the software developer before - it runs a bit like this: "... person ... work for a US-based organization ... server in Belarus, 'resulted in executing ... code and wiping over 30,000 messages and files detailing war crimes committed in Ukraine ...' " and again - it's not effing rocket science that there WILL be hacks and therefore you need to keep your ass tinplated and this "US-based organisation" needs to re-evaluate their attitude to security.

You'd think we had plenty of intimations that hackers could do some damage for the last twenty-five years from movies like Wargames, Hackers, and the whole hacker movie genre. 

Now we have exactly such situations with individuals, groups, collectives, and State groups all busily hacking the shit out of everything and anything - think about Stuxnet that was repurposed to attack centrifuges in Iran's nuclear program. And that was now twelve years ago that it was discovered and probably fifteen years since it's predecessor was programmed.

Will we ever just LEARN from stuff in the past instead of having to re-learn it to our chagrin? 

I write a lot of these sorts of articles and don't get paid for them. If you enjoyed this article and it got you energised and activated and wanting to do something, do anything to bring the world back from the craziness and disaster after disaster then please - share this article, go to my News Stand and subscribe for a newsletter, and if you'd prefer to be in charge of your own news, I've also written an article that can get you into the wonderful world of newsreaders and leave your inbox newsletter-free.

Cheers!

Why The Wealthy Stay Wealthy

It's down to us, consumers!

I've noticed one sentence cropped up in half a dozen news items tonight: ". . . leaving the consumer to foot the cost . . ."

• The inflationary shock on SPC baked beans.
• The Great Nickel Short That Failed.
• Transport Fuel cost inflation.
• Fuel costs for consumers.
• Elon Musk about Tesla and Space X's inflationary shock.

In every one of those, it was NOT a consumer that initiated the events that caused those stuff-ups. 

For example in one case the blame can be placed squarely at the feet of the guy behind Tsingshan Holding Group Co, a Chinese rich guy Xiang Guangda made a bet and lost. By all rights he should have paid that shit out of his own pocket but the London Metal Exchange cancelled that day's trading which pretty much bailed his arse out but of course now they'll be ". . . leaving the consumer to foot the cost . . ."

To be rich, you have to be rich.

Seems like everyone can screw up hugely and not really face much of a setback from it. Because you can ". . . leave the consumer to foot the cost . . ."

How good is letting everyone else bear the brunt of your failures but not share in your successes? 

Capitalism's fucked, the idea of a fiat economy ditto, and we are soooooooo ditto ditto...

Cheers, fellow cash cows. Hi ho hi ho hi ho. . . 

Someone Done Something Bad.

 You know you've done bad things when Meta (aka Facebook aka Zucktopia, the place where nipples are considered a cardinal sin) says people can say nasty things about killing you,  and even Switzerland adopts sanctions against you.

I couldn't believe that the military could be doing the things they're doing without fairly specific exonerating orders so I have to presume that they've been ordered to push boundaries and commit atrocities. And if those orders do exist and did come from the highest, there'll always be a few conscientious objectors among the ranks that are not happy about what they're being asked to do - and I do suspect that 'frontline leaks' may have contributed to Ukraine scoring a few high-value targets.

There's also been unusually fast worldwide intelligence direct to public which has given us all a front-row seat in the Russian military's war room and it seems that they are really desperate for an excuse to just take Ukraine and feel justified in committing the atrocities to date. No matter how these things are committed, the blame falls up the chain of command, and VVP can't fail to be aware of that.

Just now, "Ukraine has established an "international" legion for people from abroad and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has publicly urged foreigners to "fight side-by-side with Ukrainians against the Russian war criminals" to show support for his country." -- ABC News Australia 

It seems that while the major powers are hanging back, the rest of the world, the mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, war-hardened medics, and those who feel the need to go and bust heads, are pouring into Lviv to help.

Grumpy Old Postal Whinge

I 'fess up - I multiblog. (The three audients I have all go "Well duh Ted!") I also write on Grumpy Old Guy among others and put this on that blog yesterday: Australia Post Cracks A Funny and now I'd LOVE to expound and expand on that. Because while I know everyone has a whinge with their postal and courier / delivery services, how many have had this many in ten years? 

Australia Post did deliver on the weekends but that was over a year ago when the pandemic had them more on the ropes than normal mail has apparently always had them. But they stopped doing it that time they announced that they were so busy that they'd made a record profit but rather than hiring more staff to cope they'd just stop picking up local packages for three days while they had a jolly good cry and a Bex powder. 

Since then they've been backlogged, have - seemingly, from the results I've seen - NOT made any progress in improving and growing to meet the challenge of a post-pandemic country with a LOT more people using online ordering and delivery, and weekends haven't been done for around a year.

So when I got a text message on Saturday morning telling "you parcel from Xyzzy Co will be delivered today" I was wondering what had changed. 

The text message sort of gave me hope that they might have finally got the message that we would really like to see those record profits to be returned to us in the form of better faster service, at last. Hmmm yeah well, colour me naive . . .

But surprise surprise, the item from Xyzzy Co didn't arrive Saturday, nor even Sunday, despite the Australia Post text message quite specifically stating that the parcel was to be delivered that same day. 

But a second, different, unannounced parcel arrived - it's just that it arrived on Monday. I received it, checked the consignment number and realised that it still wasn't the parcel referred to. But that's about par for the course with such a shambolic mess of a company, so it didn't worry me untowardly. 

Then the parcel from Xyzzy Co arrived later that afternoon.  

And then later that evening I read that article about AP's "improvements" to their system so that they'd have far more accurate delivery time messages. . . It seems they can talk the talk, but the walk's still just a series of jerks and spasms and a lot of thrashing about.

Back to the roast.

When we moved house a few years ago, our redirection was - hit and miss . . . - to say the least. From that time to the present they've attempted to deliver parcels for us to a similar looking address - but in another suburb we've never lived in - and then returning the parcel to sender because they read the street name and number - but the postcode and correct suburb name I N   L A R G E   C A P I T A L   L E T T E R S apparently are just a suggestion. 

And

They've claimed to be unable to find a safe place to deliver a parcel when we have a delivery point and it's in the delivery instructions we attach to posted items and so we've had to pick it up at the PO anyway.

And

There was a letter that had mistakenly been sent here I clearly wrote NATA (Not At This Address) on - and which promptly arrived again. Three times before I took it into the local PO and said if I had to take it out of our letterbox again I'd be sending them a bill for my delivery services. 

And

One delivery was declined because apparently we had a "large unfriendly dog." At the time we had two cats that had a secluded cat yard out the back, the gate wide open, and not a dog to be seen for miles around. 

And

Then going back a few more years there was a letter from a place less than a kilometre from our house in town and that person phoned me angrily and asked why I hadn't confirmed my appointment nor shown up for it, after all it was a week ago they sent me the forms. The letter reached me the following day, meaning it had averaged 105m a day on its journey across town. 

And Now, one of their best SNAFUs

In one of those events that should happen once in a lifetime or less, I ordered some electronic hobby parts, some in late November ("shipment A") and then some more in early December ("shipment B") and . . . 

Waited. And waited. . .  

Then in mid March I asked the company, and they agreed, to resend the same order again ("shipment C") as it had obviously been lost in transit. 

In April, Shipment C arrived. Still no shipment B, mind you. But I decided to be patient for a week or two longer.

And then just as I was about to ask the company for a resend of Shipment B, it too arrived - after a mere 18 or so weeks in transit. But hey - I had all the parts for the project after almost five months so I could finally get cracking.

Then in late May, Shipment A showed up. . . 

I'd kept the wrappings with the tracking numbers on them because I wanted to keep the sender details and order numbers etc, and so I decided I'd phone Australia Post's service people. The representative I spoke to seemed to be Australian (okay, a grudging point awarded to AP for that) but very detached from reality. I asked if they kept a history of tracking numbers and he said they did, so I asked him about Shipment A. 

"Oh yes," he said, "that shipment got on an [airline Xyzzy] flight in China and then seems to have vanished." Oh boy. It "got on a plane in China" and then just - poofed. Vanished. Bloody cosmic rays. . . This guy wasn't backing down. I pointed out that if the thing got scanned ONTO a plane in China, no-one could have just thrown it out in flight, yes? 

He agreed, and I said ". . . and our airline cargo staff aren't all incompetent, are they?" and again got a "m'yup" out of him. 

"So where do you reckon it might have been lost then?" 

"Look, I told you it got on the plane in China and didn't arrive in Australia "

I gave up and asked him about Shipment B and he was right back on the ball:

"Tracking number . . . um . . . flibbetty-number-umpteen  . . . got from China to Australia and then - oh wow - it's no longer on the tracking system, perhaps it wasn't a conformant tracking number or something and got returned."

When I mentioned that I was reading those tracking numbers off of parcels that I was currently holding in my hand because they'd arrived, he spluttered a bit and said something long the lines of "Well I don't know how they could have gotten to you, they're not on any of our records" and when I told him that the Australia Post Postie had handed them to me out of his Australia Post post bag, he just muttered something and - hung up.

He couldn't deal with it and instead of doing the right thing and escalating it, he hung up. Such an ignorant prick I've never had to deal with before nor since. 

The best bit? I could see where Shipment A had been, it was received in Australia and then there was a postmark of someplace like the Seychelles a few weeks later, and finally another postmark when it was sent back to Australia in late April. The lovely folks at AP, hammered as the poor dears must have been at Christmas, kindly sent my parcel on an overseas holiday, perhaps to give themselves time, or were incompetent, or both and more. 

So

I ended up paying for two lots of Shipment A because I'm honest and I told the company the earlier order had arrived, they said maybe I should just keep it but I suggested they raise a second invoice or let me order it again and immediately mark it received, I've honeslty never heard anyone more surprised than the company rep I was speaking to. I still have Platinum customer status (or equivalent, I'm not going to give away which company this is) with them despite being thousands of dollars worth of trade short per year. 

Prior (dis)Engagements

From that episode back to 2011, I can remember vaguely that there were quite a few other incidents, the best of which was when we moved to a road not services by AP posties. We decided we'd like a PO box at the next major PO, they claimed they were out of PO boxes so we could get a free PO box at a little franchise outpost nearer to our street.

The franchise office turned out to be even worse than the official AP organisation and it caused 90% of the incidents including returning several items of redirected mail because they didn't have a clue and the address on the mail was "for some other place, how were we sposed to know?" - and they only got worse from there. At least a dozen, possibly up to twenty, incidents and failures, and we were only at that address for 14 months... I don't have time to list all that lot, but none of them have made it into this post because that one franchise PO alone would fill a post - and one day it might... 

Australia Post are an example of what happens when you don't appoint competent management - you end up like the LNP Coalition, and your company ends up as screwed as Australia currently is. . . .

Cheers.

Slipping Past - again the glyphosate issue

 22/02/2022 - a date in the balance... Amateur numerology aside, it's also a date that has just frustrated me a lot. Because of a radio news article on our national broadcaster. About farming. And careful choices of words.

Bullshit Makes Good Fertiliser

According to the report, farmers who've just had a bumper wheat crop and are now in the process of getting ready for a winter crop, are (as farmers are especially good at being) pessimistic. (cf: "We'll All Be Ruined Said Hanrahan") 

Apparently the cost of glyphosate is going to ruin these farmers, the interviewer spoke sympathetically to the farmer they were interviewing, and there was a bit of background on how glyphosate prices have been affected by COVID-19 issues, then back to the topic of how poorly this affected the outcomes for farmers.

Oh hmmm, that article on glyphosate prices . . . Umm isn't that Roundup? Of course it is. And of course that particular dirty word is absolutely not mentioned even once in the interview. Also not mentioned even once in the interview is how poorly Roundup affects outcomes for consumers. 

The stuff is according to most opinions these days toxic and carcinogenic and builds up in our system. It was once claimed that the herbicide would get washed off the crop - until it was pointed out that glyphosate is a systemic poison, i.e. it works within the plants' biological systems not on the outside of them.

Then it was claimed that it only has a short half-life and the time from spraying the paddocks before planting to when it was turned bread gave plenty of time for the herbicide to be eliminated. Turns out that was grade A bullshit too. Firstly, the half-life is longer than claimed, then too the sheer amounts applied meant that for half-life to reduce the toxin to negligible proportions meant that you'd need longer, and then - finally - the primary claim of how long the stuff was applied before harvesting was also bullshit because almost every farmer applied at least one second treatment, just a few days before harvesting, to dry the crop on the stalk and make harvesting more efficient. 

And when there's so much bullshit used to keep a product in use, you know big things are at stake. Farmers under pressure to produce the crop as cheaply as possible. The supermarkets whose huge bottom line might lose some value. The agri-chem industry that probably feels that one tiny crack will bring their stonewalling down and they'll get sued by pretty much the whole world. 

And there was even talk of banning Roundup just a few years back. Surely farmers back then could have 'read the room' and realised that Roundups' days were limited? And so maybe they should start looking for alternative herbicides and pesticides that aren't implicated in death and cancer and banned in quite a few countries by now?

But as usual, the easy way out is what was taken again this time, farmers muttering direly that the price of the winter crops are going to be higher, which is exactly the same thing they said would happen if they couldn't use Roundup. Seems like the consumer's screwed if they do and more screwed if they don't. 

There ARE alternatives

Look - let's accept a few things, okay? Life was always expensive to maintain. We've had a lucky fifty to seventy years where it wasn't, but instead of banking that we kept letting the population explode and chewed up every scrap and skerrick of that abundance and - well, here we are.

Life's no longer quite so good, prices are going up and - I hate to break it to you - are going to keep going up. And that's a result of supply and demand because the Earth consists of just so many billions of acres of useable land, and the days of one human having access to the resources of several million acres of the planet are over.

And most of us are a bit fussy - choosing only the best cuts and leaving the rest to go to pet and livestock food, wanting seasonal vegetables all year round, and water-and-land-intensive ones at that because why would we want to eat weeds? (True BTW. Some so-called weeds are sought after in less-fortunate countries and are more nutritious than the intensive farmed alternative crop we prefer instead.)

So - what are the alternatives?

Well, all herbicides and pesticides are 'icides - they're toxic, they're made to kill things, things like weeds and insects, and because we have a few things in common with moths and moulds, like a seriously large chunk of DNA and sensitivity to these same toxins, also US. Everything from the lowliest one celled organism to the largest blue whales (and that includes us in there somewhere) are Earth Lifeforms. 

Seems weird to be saying that, but perhaps this is the one thing we really, really, need right now, to become us aware - really aware - that we are all interdependent inhabitants of (and parts of) this planet. Every part needs every other part, and balance.

Us consuming everything in sight was probably okay a million years ago when there would have been fewer that 200,000 of us across the whole planet. But with close to nine billion of us, we've hit peak Earth.

And then there's pandemic. . .

Coronavirus can be seen as a balancing. Because populations get ever larger, there are more and more people that are forced further out into what was previously natural habitat. They are generally in no position to be choosy about how they make a living, so they either consume or catch kill and sell bushmeat. Or they just have to live someplace that we didn't live in before and there are a few wild animals that have a virus. And normally we'd never come in contact with that animal and its passenger.

But our expansion forced that meeting, however it actually came about. And it's  working to reduce our numbers just as other plagues and pandemics did in the past. Only now, we're better at winning pandemics, and so the virus is still mutating among the people that can't or won't have vaccinations and quarantines. 

So - we shouldn't try to cover the whole Earth. We shouldn't close our minds to alternative foods, clean energy sources, and clean technologies. We should make it possible for every living person to live a life without desperation and with access to shelter, water, and food - and vaccinations and health programs including birth control.

If we do all that, we might just survive.

1st Update in 2022

Oh the oddness! I seem to have gained a weird widget in the page code that sends you to the footer. I vaguely remember adding it but it's getting added to! Also, an aggregator site you can check for only updated posts. 

(Because I'm pretty much solo on all these blogs, also doing the occasional Youtube or Twitch video, not all my sites get regular updates, so an aggregator site presents the most recent for you to have a read of)

It'll appear in the footer once I have it set up, it's still a WIP.

[ Check my other sites - loads of interesting stuff! ]