And inks are not clean either. I live in Ashland, Mass which is large
superfund cleanup site.
http://www.colorantshistory.org/Nyanza.html
Inks and dyes are nasty. I used to work in the printed circuit industry (my
first Smalltalk job!) and so I've seen firsthand how toxic it can be to make
computer boards. I won't try to guess what's more toxic to the environment
(and to people). My understanding is that China is currently just about the
most polluted place going. They're paying a steep price for their economic
boom.
-Carl
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mack
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2012 5:12 PM
To: Fundamentals of New Computing
Subject: Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book
Just a reminder that paper-making is one of the more toxic industries in
this country:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_pollution
Paper itself may be simple and eco-friendly, but the commercial process to
produce it is rife with chorine, dioxin, etc. not to mention heavy thermal
pollution of water sources.
So there are definitely arguments on both sides of the ledger wrt eBooks.
-- Mack
On Mar 8, 2012, at 1:54 PM, BGB wrote:
On 3/8/2012 12:34 PM, Max Orhai wrote:
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign
> and affordable.
>
That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back it up? Low cost and
environmental impact are supposed to be some of the strong points of
ebooks.
Glad you asked! That was a pretty drastic simplification, and I'm conflating
'software' with 'hardware' too. Without wasting too much time, hopefully,
here's what I had in mind.
I live in a city with some amount of printing industry, still. In the past,
much more. Anyway, small presses have been part of civic life for centuries
now, and the old-fashioned presses didn't require much in the way of
imports, paper mills aside. I used to live in a smaller town with a
mid-sized paper mill, too. No idea if they're still in business, but I've
made my own paper, and it's not that hard to do well in small batches. My
point is just that print technology (specifically the letterpress) can be
easily found in the real world which is local, nontoxic, and "sustainable"
(in the sense of only needing routine maintenance to last indefinitely) in a
way that I find hard to imagine of modern electronics, at least at this
point in time. Have you looked into the environmental cost of manufacturing
and disposing of all our fragile, toxic gadgets which last two years or
less? It's horrifying.
I would guess, apart from macro-scale parts/materials reuse (from
electronics and similar), one could maybe:
grind them into dust and extract reusable materials via means of mechanical
separation (magnetism, density, ..., which could likely separate out most
bulk glass/plastic/metals/silicon/... which could then be refined and
reused);
maybe feed whatever is left over into a plasma arc, and maybe use either
magnetic fields or a centrifuge to separate various raw elements (dunno if
this could be made practical), or maybe dissolve it with strong acids and
use chemical means to extract elements (could also be expensive), or lacking
a better (cost effective) option, simply discard it.
the idea for a magnetic-field separation could be:
feed material through a plasma arc, which will basically convert it into
mostly free atoms;
a large magnetic coil accelerates the resultant plasma;
a secondary horizontal magnetic field is applied (similar to the one in a
CRT), causing elements to deflect based on relative charge (valence
electrons);
depending on speed and distance, there is likely to be a gravity based
separation as well (mostly for elements which have similar charge but differ
in atomic weight, such as silicon vs carbon, ...);
eventually, all of them ram into a wall (probably chilled), with a more or
less 2D distribution of the various elements (say, one spot on the wall has
a big glob of silicon, and another a big glob of gold, ...). (apart from
mass separation, one will get mixes of "similarly charged" elements, such as
globs of silicon carbide and titanium-zirconium and similar)
an advantage of a plasma arc is that it will likely result in some amount of
carbon-monoxide and methane and similar as well, which can be burned as fuel
(providing electricity needed for the process). this would be similar to a
traditional gasifier.
but, it is possible that in the future, maybe some more advanced forms of
manufacturing may become more readily available at the small scale.
a particular example is that it is now at least conceivably possible that
lower-density lower-speed semiconductor electronics (such as polymer
semiconductors) could be made at much smaller scales and cheaper than with
traditional manufacturing (silicon wafers and optical lithography), but at
this point there is little economic incentive for this (companies don't
care, as they have big expensive fabs to make chips, and individuals and
communities don't care as they don't have much reason to make their own
electronics vs just buying those made by said large semiconductor
manufacturers).
similarly, few people have much reason to invest much time or money in
technologies which are likely to max out in the MHz range.
but, conceivably, one could make a CPU, and memory, essentially using
conductive and semiconductive inks and an old-style printing-plates
(possibly, say, on a celluloid substrate), if needed (making a CPU probably
itself sort of resembling a book...). also sort of imagining some here the
idle thought of movable-type logic gates and similar, ...
granted, such a scenario is very unlikely at present (it would likely only
occur due to a collapse of current manufacturing or distribution
architecture). any restoration of the ability to do large scale manufacture
is likely to result in a quick return to faster and more powerful
technologies (such as optical lithography).
apart from a loss of knowledge, it is unlikely society would return to an
entirely pre-industrial state, though many hybrid forms seem possible.
societal collapse and a loss of heavy industry need not necessarily mean an
end to either electronics or computers (or society either looking like the
mid 1800s, or for that matter, like the "Mad Max" movies...).
I can only conceive of paper books having a lower TCO than ebooks if
people usually spent all day reading the same book again and again for
several years.
Well, I had my own book collection in mind, which is well under 100 volumes,
almost all mathematics, and I expect will last me for a few more decades
anyway. More ephemeral books I'm happy to get out of the libraries, or
'rent' from the local used bookstores. Quality before quantity is a major
part of the POV I'm trying to get across. YMMV if you prefer lots of cheap,
fast-decaying information, which I am fully aware is the trend these days.
many of my books tended to be assorted old computer-related books (with some
random math books and old text-books and similar in the mix).
a few things I had manually printed and bound, mostly for sake of being able
to reference things easier in this form than as PDF's.
-- Max
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