Successful Cleantech Stories Roundup

Sustainable Happy Endings

Often, we read about failures of recycling or cleantech or any tech to remain clean. Not today. Today I'm rounding up a few neat success stories, which makes a nice change. I'm proud to say that several feature Australian successes, which means we've been doing something right. 

After right after reading a few of the disasters (hey - I have to give some balance to my coverage, but hang in, it's not a lot of negativity, and it'll make the next few stories seem even happier and nicer...) that come up we can dive into the happy fluffy bunny news...

The first is the inevitable story about how plastic recycling will never work, and I call BS right in the first paragraph, "Americans support recycling" because the author quite patently doesn't - and is really only making a case for manufacturers to be allowed to continue making virgin plastic because as she says it is never recycled. 

Aside from the whole litany of reasons that used to be given for not recycling plastics (which may have held true two decades ago but have now been shown to be BS) she then segues right into conflating 'wasteful' with 'oooh dangerous! Flammable!' which is just as much BS, you can see the agenda of this article like a big "BULLSHOTT!!!" stamp over pretty much every word. 

And the heart of the matter is here, in this snippet: "...(r)ecycled plastic costs more than new plastic..." - and there it is. Poor billion dollar corporations shouldn't be required to fix their stuff-ups by recycling the plastics, they should just keep pumping out more and more nice new CHEAP plastic. You can read the rest but you can see can't you that it's just going to go under the hill and not just downhill, from there. 

The second story (paywalled, sorry) is a bit more grim but it shows what happens when we let attitudes and stories like the previous one become the narrative. Can't be bothered to stop pumping up fossil fuels because they created an empire on it, can't be bothered recycling the filthy remnants of their industry because it might slightly lower their obscene bottom line profits, and we end up with the mess coming back to haunt:
"Someone. Some place called .. wait, was it the Cannery islands or something? Yeah, that's the ones. As long as it's not around the beach of my mansion IDGAF, next item on the agenda please."

THAT is the level of rapacious greed and bastardry we're up against. ALWAYS call these bastards out, ALWAYS write to your government and the company's upper echelons and point out that we don't want to cop this shit any more. ALWAYS. 

So good news stories are very much needed, just remember that the bad news ones like those above don't just go away, they have to be driven away.

Microorganisms and Compounds

While some of the little thing are giving us colds and flus and COVID, there's a few others that are being quite helpful. Whether they're our bread and beer buddies "eatin' lead" for our common good, grasses quietly chowing down on military RDX residues, or  worms eating polystyrene (PS) as their main menu item, small organisms are becoming powerful allies in the effort to clean up our waste products. 

The fact that this is research that should have been 'done and dusted' BEFORE ever releasing the products they're now cleaning up for us should be a fact not lost on you. This is one of the biggest reasons why we're here in this situation now. The other reason is, you know, harvesting those resources out of the planet without paying the real cost of them. Which we're now having to pay because past corporations didn't GAF for future us. 

We've learned to live on the planet, at first in two dimensions, and then in three. But so far we've done a really crap job of navigating the fourth dimension. You know when a sci fi story has the protagonist go back in time and do something that changes the present? Well, turns out we should really have been paying attention to the story where the protagonist does something now and it has profound effects in the future. . . Yeah . . .

But back to one more good story of a tiny critter making big differences in the world is these bacteria that may soon be simultaneously able to digest plastics and produce antibiotics. This is the kind of research we need right now, and not hamstrung by the false old idea of economic value. I'd go so far as to say that if we poured every cent of ALL the wealth on the planet into such research right now, that's pretty much the only way we're going to survive the legacy that 'past us' has left us. . .

The Place Of Tech

And what tech has dirtied, tech can clean up. From a futuristic-sounding plasma technology that can destroy the 'forever' chemical PFAS to Shenzen technology blogger, developer, and maker Naomi Wu developing inexpensive and easy to make far-UV light fixtures that destroy airborne virus particles, technological advances in fields other than just the biological are making a difference. The latter story in particular illustrates how the growing field of technology 'makers' now have the resources and thanks to people like Ms Wu, the knowledge, to put their skills to work and come up with solutions.

In my view, corporations should actually  be required to sponsor such citizen scientists / engineers / biologists because some of the best, simple, and inexpensive solutions are coming from this sector. I needn't point out how makers produced face shields, masks, test equipment, prosthetics, and a whole slew of other public health and safety equipment. 

The Wins

Just a few simple words to show that if you make your message about single-use plastics absolutely clear, it does have a measurable and visible effect. Most of the plastic bag and straw pollution on Australian beaches is not from Australia but drifting over from Asia. Which goes to show that significant reductions CAN be achieved.

And it's not just plastic bags and straws, nor is it a new thing. Some of the research has been carried out over years of study.

Hydrogen

I'm totally stealing this from TEdADYNE Systems' usual EV and sustainable energy pile of stories: Some odd 'solar pixels' tale about using sun and some designed materials to create clean H2 for use as a fuel. 

Okay - the reporter in that story didn't quite seem to get that it's a process with some similarities to photosynthesis in that these materials when exposed to light split hydrogen and oxygen out of water directly without the step of generating electricity and then using electrolysis.

It's a much more direct process and so should produce a greater yield with better efficiency. The downside appears to be that the materials degrade over time with use. I guess it remains to be seen whether the constant replacement of the reactive material will cost more in energy than the cells harvest, or if it'll be a useful and valuable way to generate hydrogen.

It wasn't plain from the article either, but since some of the material is carbon-based, then there's every chance that it could be arranged that the major outputs of these cells could be H2 and CO2. And while it may seem that generating CO2 is a Bad Thing, in fact with an ancillary plant included in the plans, you could generate even more useful output from the operation, which would maybe push it over the edge to a viable technology:

It *seems* from the article that CO2 could be a side product, to which I say that you should just pipe that gas over an algae reactor and harvest either food (spirulina or other food algae,) animal feed (same but a wider range of algae,) or a carbohydrate oil that can then be further cracked for more H2.

So that's it for now. The images are sections out of AI generated imagery from https://craiyon.com which is a project from some of the same people that made Dall-E Mini.

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; Or email me;

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.

Stuff You Don't Need

But It's Nice To Have 

Something I've said - start with a flat sandwich press like a panini press - is bull. I know I said it's the machine to start with but I started with an iron, an ordinary electric clothes iron, and a cotton teatowel that had seen better days, and some plastic bread bags, some stray bits of 3D printing filament, and baking paper. Start with anything.

I don't even have pictures it was so much an off the cuff experiment. I arranged the filament strands to frame a piece of bread bag with a neat design on it, covered them with two layers of baking paper, and ironed them into the fabric. It worked, and it didn't look half bad, but it would have been too stiff for clothing which is what I was trying to achieve, appliques for clothing to give them another crack at life.

It did give me a few more ideas though. not that I can follow through just yet because I can't really afford to spend money on an A3 laminator that I'm going to modify heavily or destroy in the process. But it would make tough plastic/textile laminate that could be used for waterproof cladding or making enclosures or boxes or storage crates.

I've used hairdryers and hot air guns to shape plastic around things I've built, as waterproofing and bump protection, and I've used a 3D pen to repair broken plastic items and join parts together.

And when I can afford to get one of those desktop mini ovens I'll also be able to make castings with waste plastics. Later, when I have time to make a decent press, I can make harder castings and when / if I can turn that to another use, plastic injection molds and objects. 

The Exhortation:

Look - you can start with the sandwich press and two pieces of BBQ heat shield cloth and some oven mitts. You can start with a clothes flatiron and some baking paper. But you CAN start pretty much now. 

Learn the types of plastics and then think: HDPE and PP can be re-used by chopping it up and then using the sandwich maker or the flatiron, LDPE can also be done the same way. (NOT together - you need to keep your plastics separated into types - here I'm going to suggest chipping your plastics quite small, cutting open 2litre and 3litre milk jugs and storing the plastics in different jugs according to type - and if you desire, colour as well - and then you can experiment to your heart's content.)

Plastic drink, milk jugs, and other tops are generally 5-PP or 2-HDPE, bottles are usually 1-PET and nut easy to deal with using kitchen appliances, and must bread bags / toilet roll bags, and similar are 4-LDPE. The numbers are the number you'll find in the recycling triangle symbols usually (hopefully!) stamped on most plastics these days. 

SAFETY

3-PVC, 6-PS, and a lot of 7-Other plastics are either too toxic to safely process with limited equipment, require more heat than we can apply, and release toxic fumes when heated. And in general I advise you to avoid them until you've got some experience under your belt and done more research.

Don't steal yer Mum's sandwich/jaffle maker to do these things - plastics can leach chemicals that you probably don't want to ingest along with your next ham'n'cheese toastie. 

Only work in a well-ventilated space and if possible with a powered charcoal filter fume extractor. (This one from IKEA doesn't come with the charcoal filter as standard but you can buy those here. And these air purifiers will as a side benefit also pull COVID virus out of the air in your work area.) We have two of them because of these reasons. I also use mine to pull soldering fumes away from me when I'm doing electronics. 

Plastic is a bit like napalm - it not only stores heat and burns, it sticks and that can cause nasty burns. Use oven mitts at the very least, and silicon mitts if you can get them. You have been warned.

The BBQ sheets I'm talking about are generally 20x35ish pieces of shiny black cloth sold as BBQ sheets and meant to be placed on the BBQ to either keep IT clean or keep your food clean, but I'd never use one because the aforementioned volatile compounds (fumes) will be released at around 300C and your BBQ can easily reach that without you knowing. But perfect for keeping plastic from sticking to your toastie maker or flatiron.

Future

In future, time allowing, I'll be developing a few more uses for common equipment and devices, plus a few ways to make inexpensive machines for more complex processes. I'm always looking for collaborators and people wanting to take on some of this research or do some writing on this or one of the other blogs (all for raising public awareness and disseminating information) I have a contact form in the footer below. It's all voluntary but then again I've been doing this on a pension for several years now, and who knows, one day this kind of work may be valued for what it's worth...

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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; Or email me;

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.

Care Parcels Arrive

 A lot of parts arrive

I feel all spoiled saying this, but I've had a load of parts arrive from AliExpress. And while I've yet to receive anything from the monetisation of the blogs, I did have a lot of surveys completed in the last few weeks. (Yeah, I know - how does he do it? How does he spend so much time researching articles and writing them, do surveys, keep a household running, and still find time to do surveys?)

Well, actually the surveys that powered this splurge were done almost three months ago and it's taken an average of six weeks for the delivery to get here. But I have the next survey income in my account for the next bits I'll need. It's only $20 or $40 at a time but it's all helping. Except . . .

The aforementioned conceiving, researching, and writing. They do take time, and I haven't printed anything or built anything or done anything in the interim because I've had no time. I have a vegetable garden to mind, compost to look after, meals to cook, washing to do, and a lovely wife to be with occasionally.

So these parts got photographed, put in drawers and storage bins. And now I'm sitting here watching Night Skies with my wife and writing this article, wishing I had more free time. 

 

Selection, L to R top to bottom:

A board that I'll have to fix; a logging board;
the whole ki n kaboodle in the car.

As you can see, there's a MOSFET board that I need to fix but I'm sitting here feeling too tired to get up and do it. Tomorrow morning I'll give it a go. 

A second care parcel arrived - thanks to a long survey (in multiple parts, each quite long, and worth a cool tenner apiece) - and so I have some soil moisture probes, motor drivers, and more; This time with no parts that needed repairing. So I put a RTC board on my test setup. And then had to have an eye checkup, a pre-admission consult with an anaesthetist, a doctor appointment to have both a COVID booster and a flu shot, and also get wired up for a sleep study. 

Since each of those took a little while and then even more time waiting around and driving myself there and back, I've barely had time to admire the realtime clock board let alone download a library for it, and the battery I grabbed in between times for the data logging board(s) turned out to be the wrong one so - another thing I have to find time for.

So one project is the garden controller which might get finished one day. It will have the data logger/RTC and one of the four MOSFET driver boards and several soil moisture probes. 

And this afternoon was spent watching a magnificent incoming high tide at a great holiday spot - but done because my wife too has had medical appointments this week and that was one such, took ages and since we were in Inverloch we decided to use the opportunity to have lunch in the car and then stroll out on the jetty. 😸

And I'm sorry this is a short update only, as you can gather from the tone of it, I'm feeling like I'm under the hammer and in need of a few collaborators to help with things. There's gear to design and build, articles other people could write and contribute, - and serious organising to do that I'm not cut out for and nor will I ever find the time to equip myself to do it. If this sounds like something you could give some time to, contact me. (Link in footer.)

And - also - PS - to whit - and to boot: I did resolder the MSOFET to its lead stumps, I could have replaced it completely but I'm a tight-arse.

Cheapskate repairs a specialty; but the board lives!

Soil moisture probe; and some of the wires I wore

for the sleep study.

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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 take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information in your inbox for free; Or contact me via the webform or directly email me if you'd like to help; or donate either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there.

Magazines, Blogs, And Being Editor

What Do I Actually Do? 

I've been asking myself what I actually do. For a start:- 

I spent most of my life wanting to be a mad scientist or inventor or at least involved with STEAM of some sort. (STEAM stands for 'Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math.') And I have, sort of. I started in electronics and electrical right from primary school, mixed with a bit of market gardening, and hey - that wasn't a bad collection of experience before my 15th birthday. 

And then I hand built myself a computer way before they were cool (never actually got it to do more than flash the front panel lights in cool patterns because - well, because that's all those early computers had, front panel lights and piano key paddle looking switches, no keyboards and monitors for me) and bought a succession of early 'personal' computers as they were known then. 

As soon as "IBM Clone PCs" (IBM Clone Personal Computers, yep) came along I got one, got a BBS (Bulletin Board System) going on it - and started writing a load of text files online. Kind of like paleolithic blogging. And then the Internet came along and the pages I wrote then were arguably blog posts despite writing them in Notepad and in HTML format, and then blog software came along - and then online blog software came along. 

Blog posts are of course the ultimate DILLIGAF freestyle writing/diarising vehicle that aren't white or grey papers, aren't theses, instruction manuals, fiction, religious tomes, specification sheets, essays, nor newspaper or magazine articles.

Oh yeah - I also diversified into a year of computer typesetting for a small country newspaper, editing for the newspaper, and writing for it as well, so I got the basics of writing reportage and newspaper articles at grassroots level. 

But it's left me with a permanent question mark - what do I actually do? Are my articles, articles? Blog posts? What the actual heck is a "blog post?" 

The Dilemma

It's a conundrum alright. When I started blogging I was more opinionated and less insightful, because I was in my early 30s. Oh - I had insights too, I was just black and white about how I presented them - "Here's a thing I just realised, and  I say it's the only solution so - accept it. YW. Or else." I still had all these deep realisations but I tended to reject any other ways of seeing a matter.

There are holes in my record - which I realised just now stretch all the way back to the early 80s - OMG I AM OLD! 🙀😿 - because of special events in my life:

Apparently From Pre-History:

There was the Great Rain of '85 that kindly washed a whole box (unfortunately a cardboard box *sigh*) of diskettes and took with it three unfinished novellas, dozens of entries that were my - I guess blog posts as they were short discussion on stuff happening in the 80s - hipsteresque blog posts, and a load of actual diary entries. 

That was followed by The First Disk Hard Drive Crash just a few years later that wiped out my first BBS files directory, and which unfortunately were local only so not sent out onto the filebone where they'd have at least lived on and still been on multiple BBSs for me to recover.

It was going to be over ten years to The Other HDD Crash because I learned my lesson and started backing up, initially to a hellaciously expensive tape drive that was itself prone to weird issues, then to a ZIP drive when the tape drive started becoming too unreliable, and finally when the ZIP drive developed the Death Click I bit the bullet, borrowed a mate's ZIP drive to read my disks and store them to an equally expensive external HDD caddy, erased my ZIPs and gave them to said mate as a thank you for letting me use the drive for a week.

But TOHDDC did of course come. Quite literally, when I was backing stuff up to it and the cat reached up to snag the cable and it quite literally hit a hard floor from a metre up while still spinning flat out. 

So not much remains from that era either. . .

Pre-Modern History:

From the mid 90s I was already using the Internet to put my ramblings so from there on most things (sort of) got preserved. I say sort of because there are always flame wars, drunkposting, and stuff I ended up not liking. And a few OhNoSecond events... (yep, literal times I formatted a HDD or USB memory and the moment my finger had hit the Enter key, that split second before I realised it contained the only copies of a dozen posts I still hadn't posted...)

But TEdALOG Lite II: Don't Touch That Dial!!! (Which became just TEdALOG Lite II following a rejig of the blog) stands as the first of what I'd call "real blogs" in that they ran in online blog servers not some piece of software you had to nurse and nurture on your PC and that then posted a suite of pages each time you added a new entry or edited an old one, overwriting whatever was online and (in my case) costing as significant chunk of bandwidth and time each time.

TEdALOG Lite II was soon joined by TEdAMENU Tuckertime because food, and TEdADYNE Systems because I was getting interested in the ethical and moral issues surrounding cyborging, AI, and all manner of what not long after became mainstream issues like job losses to automation. 

These all languished for a few years when I was suffering health issues and then came back sporadically as I adjusted to a different life halfway across Australia and where I now still am, but happier than I've ever been, and now with a bit of a mission to get waste, sustainability, recycling, and food politics etc up as talking points and conversations.

And Now:

I've decided that I don't have a 'house style' to conform to, I don't have any one topic that's nearer and dearer to my heart than any other in my chosen range of subjects, and I write in a mix of tenses and POVs that people've found hard to follow at times.

My counsellor tells me that humans are meant to tackle projects serially with rest breaks in between, but that our 'always on' lifestyles are robbing us of the pauses we should take in each day. We're living in large metropolises and urbanisations where we should be in smaller villages or communes or at most no larger than small towns.

And because I'm always on, I guess my articles show it. But I do try. I take time for gardening and cooking meals slowly and with care, and we always take a break after a meal. And my writing also (I hope) shows that facet of life as well . . .

I've decided I write Self Help DIY Communal Shared Instructables with diversions and sidetracks. And I can only hope you like that and want more of it. There are shreds in there among all the verbiage, I promise. Oh and sometimes I write fiction pieces but you'll know those because they're generally a bit - off the wall/chain/brain. . .

I'd welcome a balance to my style on the various blogs and on the various topics, so if you feel you'd like to write here, please contact me. I'll tell you how in a minute. If you'd like to be part of what I hope becomes a movement, a swell of peaceful activism, contact me. 

Every person you share one of my articles with, becomes one more person who'll be inclined to raise their voice for some sanity, less waste, more sustainability. And now how you can find my other current articles, how you can become a part of it (hint: you already are, thank you for reading this article) and how you can contact me

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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 take a subscription to my weekly newsletter where you'll receive the same information in your inbox for free; Or contact me via the webform or directly email me; Or donate, either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee, or even make a regular monthly donation there...