Re-Think Modern Materials

According to a number of reports, there is a large quantity of plastic garbage floating around the Pacific, somewhere between Oregon and Hawaii. Could that be used as a raw materials and fuel source?

http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/3724/Poisonous-Plastics-Part-One

the only renewable resources I can think of reproduce themselves; plants and animals. We could use more wood but I feel there isn't enough to replace our current levels of plastics consumption. To answer the second question - stop the advertisers persuading people to buy things they don't need, persuade people to buy things with the intention of keeping them. Make fashion illegal.

There is a few trillion barrels of oil locked in the oil slate located in Wyoming, Colorado, an Montana. Extracting it at a low enough cost is the key, but hundred dollar oil may be the right cost.

"Those, who are unwilling to learn from history, bound to repeat it."

Mankind, in its history, went from lower power and concentration to higher. You can piss and moan, but that is the trend. It does not (I repeat it does not) say ANYTHING about the quality of life. Rather, history tells us, that richer countries have better environment (because they want an can afford?!?).

Pissing and moaning will not get us back into prehistorical ages. While we respect our forefathers, and want to learn about their ways. More, we want to preserve them for our childrens to learn, and maybe for us to experience, so that it stays to be our genetic inheritance, we cannot stay there, and design our future. But, that is not the end of the story (unless you stay with Carter's ""lets huddle around the fire until it lasts" philosophy. I - for one - flat refuse that idea.

Complicated? Yes! So What???

Do you want to live in a boring universe??? I do not!

Right now everyone's happy...happy. As the reserves dwindle all things produced by them will become more and more expensive, hence more valuable. Tupperware will be worth its weight in gold or at least be worth more. Those who have will continue to have and everyone else will become peasants. Follow the money to see who is in control. Hay does anyone know where I could get one of those road warrior cars I heard they get great sun millage. I wonder if NORAD is running on wind turbines?

Oil may have reached its peak and be in decline, but it will be used for many years to come as we work on increasing alternatives to it. Certainly we will use more plant-based products, including genetically engineered plants. There are several centuries worth of coal supplies which can be processed into synthetic oil and gas, plus varieties of plastics. It would seem that many are already rethinking ways to produce those things we use with different raw materials.

In WW II Germany made gasoline from coal and several countries are turning to coal as a fuel source for autos using a similar process. Plastics and many other products can be made from plants. We may even go back to using rubber trees to make tires and discover better ways of recycling that are more competitive with using new raw materials.

The one thing we should not do is impose "energy saving" by law, resulting in higher costs. Products which save money will sell and the market will determine our energy savings. Get busy inventors, build a better, more efficient product that will do the same thing and save money.

"What renewable resources could be used to create the vast array of materials and products we rely upon? "

i think this needs to be answered by our chemical engineers. i hope they join in on this blog conversation. they are going to have to lead if this is going to happen. i am sure that organic oils can be substitiuted for petroleum. my source for this is only anecdotal, so again leave it to the pros. oil was chosen as the source for most modern products back in the 30's. we have gone down this rat hole, willy-nilly. other choices were available at the time. they were chosen because it profited them. the other choices would have profited someone else. now the cost of turning down those other paths could be high.

i note that this blog is not about energy, or conservation, or transportation. i think that is good. hopefully we can solve those problems. if we are succesful, we will still need to make material goods.

far seeing companies that start trying to find alternatives to oil to produce goods, will reap the benifits of higher oil prices.

so, someone needs to identify the crops to be grown for the future. one that is being studied in india is neem oil. it is from a tropical plant that grows like a weed, and is already being incorperated into many products, just because of its benifical health aspects. neem plants love hot humid climates. when i blogged buying neem seeds (the source of the oil), i had sellers wanting to sell it to me in very large quantities, as in 25 tons at a time. i feel that if there was an unending demand for it they could make enough to be a significant contributer.

"How can we dampen our dependence on oil based materials and re-create products using renewable materials?"

we can do this by supporting good companies that go this direction, and witholding support from those that don't. the ones that don't will die off from the oil shortage anyway, especially if there is competition from cheaper, organic, renewable sources.

i believe companies need to start behaving more like toyota, who asks what they want to be doing in 50 years and starts planning on it. not focasing in on what their stockbrockers want for their next dividend. short sighted is short changed in the long run.

Thank you for such a comment ! I'm in total agreement with you. Just a short story. I worked some years ago as an advanced project manager in a rich swiss based Group and I had the honour to be selected for a special "prospective" management training provided by a worlwide notorious professor at Michigan University. The aim of this training was to discover what would be the future strategy of the company for the ten following years and to identify the key managers of the future. At the end of this 8 months process, the deliverable was a 2" thick report with very advanced proposals, a majority of theme related to development of environmental friendly technologies and use of alternative energy to oil.

Thanks to the formal CEO of the company, this project was on tracks and started to be implemented! But unfortunately, this wise man retired and the new CEO (who has been fired some years later !) did'nt care at all of this project and was more interested in short term benefits and shareholder values. The result was that all people (30) involved in this visionary project which cost millions of $, left the company, me included, and the project was abandoned.

One additional comment: In the report, a huge trend analysis had been performed and lead to scenari of what would be our world in 2010. We were wrong on one thing: Changes are going faster than what we predicted !!