Recycling of materials from composite boats?

Another more recent video:

The race to fix clean energy's waste problem https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0h44h48/the-race-to-fix-clean-energy-s-waste-problem

 

And now they need to figure out what to do with the many thousands of gallons of toxic waste generated by dissolving the epoxy.

 

All you need is a very cheap, clean and abundant energy source. Given that, you can separate everything back to the raw elements. and recombine them to get what you want. If only cold fusion had worked... (Of course, any cheap, clean and abundant energy source would create other ecological problems, because people have would little need to be efficient. But it's not fair to expect people to solve more than one problem at a time. )

 

Of course if we had a cheap abundant clean energy source, we wouldn't make wind turbine blades in need of recycling.

 

Wondering if a kitchen food blender or a garden chipper would grind it up safer and easier?

 

Naw, the stuff is ultralight.

 

Buy your wife a new one before you try the experiment!Which is unlikely to work,but you will at least have staved off the threat of divorce.

 

Perhaps the imminent threat...

 

Agreed. I wonder if grinding up potentially toxic materials in a food processing device would be a good idea if it were also used for food.

Then again, blenders, especially the high powered blenders with non-sharp blades that might deal best with non-fluid materials, consume substantial energy, which itself is an environmental issue.

 

Anything that requires grinding, cutting, etc, will be creating huge amounts of micro plastics that will be impossible to completely to contain.

So what is better, burying the whole blade in the ground to slowly release micro plastics, or pulverize them right away and release them all at once into the environment.

Or, like in the link, dissolve them and create a liquid toxic waste that needs to be dealt with.

 

There is a lot of information missing from the descriptions I linked to. Clearly, trade secrets are involved.

We don't know that the liquid is a toxic waste, or that it can't be neutralized.

I'm neither a chemical engineer, nor a biologist. But let's speculate anyway:

One source talks about dissolving the epoxy plastic, using an acid. And one talks about using a catalyst. Producing the acid presumably requires energy. It must break some of the bonds that hold the plastic together. If that takes it all the way back to monomers, you could replasticize the monomers to create another plastic - perhaps even another epoxy. If not, you might still be able to make another plastic from the result. Of course plasticization isn't completely clean.

But perhaps you could make other plastic reinforced fiber objects, like boats, from the products. E.g., fiberglass kayaks! A whole lot of fiberglass kayaks. Or other fiberglass boats.

Breaking the bonds almost certainly involves an endothermic reaction - perhaps it only occurs fast enough at high temperature. Which requires energy.

And neutralizing the acid requires something like a base (e.g., lime), which has to be mined, or produced using energy.

So it all comes down to chemistry and energy.

The recycling of metals also involves chemistry and energy. You have to break the bonds that hold the metal together, by melting it, which takes energy. And you may need to re-purify the result, depending on what you want to do with the metal.

I suppose the energy could come from wind turbines...

Or from water turbines. We could harness hydroelectric power, from rivers or tides. But even such "renewable" energy sources have environmental side effects. E.g., some theories about the causes of the Permian extinction event have involved a slowing of ocean currents. That's a bit extreme, but it obviously isn't the case that slowing air and/or water flow can be done without some side effects.

We could alternately imagine a biological solution, using bacteria, powered by photosynthesis. But how do we make sure those bacteria don't destroy other plastic things? A major reason for using plastics instead of wood is that they biodegrade much more slowly. We better not create bacteria that change that.) Maybe we need bacteria that only function at fairly high temperatures. And hope they don't evolve.

In other words, we really don't know enough about the proposed solutions to speculate accurately.

 

https://ericwsponberg.com/wp-content/uploads/recycling-dead-boats.pdf