41–47 of 47 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean "take care of itself"?
It'll make its way through the food chain and gradually clear up. Yes, it's going to harm a lot of ocean life in the mean time, but there's not much we can do about that. It's like trying to get red wine out of the white carpet and back into the bottle. We should stop spilling the wine or at the very least drink it somewhere safer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or we could stop making plastic. Or at least the 90% of it making junk. Even if we separate it, it still exists, as does basically all the plastic we've ever produced. Even separated, at the rate we're producing it, wherever we put it will overflow.
Or we can chill out, enjoy the time we have left here and let nature take its course. There is no promise from nature that humanity need exist, nor that it need keep existing. Yes we can add 10% to our lifespan by getting ourselves all worked up over microplastics and climate change but the universe still wins in the long run.
I've never owned a polyester garment that could be washed in water. Aren't they all dry-clean only? Blends (like denim) I can see but in general it seems like people just wash their clothes too often and use the machine too much instead of hand-washing.
No I just checked and many clothes like jackets, swim shorts and blue jeans the first 2 on the list made from 100% polyester are supposed to be machine washed. Save yourself some money and throw that clothing in the wash machine on delicate and you should be fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or we could stop making plastic. Or at least the 90% of it making junk. Even if we separate it, it still exists, as does basically all the plastic we've ever produced. Even separated, at the rate we're producing it, wherever we put it will overflow.
In Europe (yes, generalizing an entire continent) we generally avoid landfills and instead burn anything nontoxic that doesn't go to recycling. It's a great way to produce electricity and have all produced gases in one place where you can filter them. Plastic burns just fine. Obviously we try to recycle it first, but a lot of it still ends up burned. The ash that's left over is used in construction, but plastic doesn…
But, do what you want with that anecdote (toxic, wasteful, unsustainable, etc)
We built an adjustable 500W h-bridge based amplifier (operating between 50kHz to 300kHz+) which was used to drive transducers to create standing waves for waste water treatment, and it seemed to work alright in a bunch of our tests, but at fairly low flow rates.
We passed the prototype on to the client (I think it was for a joint project between Monash University and Melbourne Water), not sure where it ended up. Great to see the technique being applied in consumer applications :)
How do I know that the acoustic standing wave is still activating, and separating the microplastics?
Say this has been productized and I now have a seven-year-old washing machine equipped with this. How do I know that the acoustic standing wave is still activating, and separating the microplastics?