On 2/08/2018 7:57 PM, Tim Krins wrote:
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that Python would be a silver bullet here,
or even any kind of bullet.
I would expect sorting with computer vision is already very very
possible, but would be slower and more expensive than huge shredders,
magnets, water baths and other 'passive' sorting methods.
The idea of creating building materials out of recycled plastic has
been around for a while - check out companies like ByFusion - which
may come into their own as China rejects recyclable plastic shipments.
Not trying to bring the mood down - I would love to build a home out
of recycled plastic (as long as I could be very confident about its
structural stability over time).
At the end of the day waste has to be dealt with. There is just so much
of it. Someone somewhere will figure out how to do it.
The sheer volume demands automation and that should attract entrepreneurs.
I reckon it will be an incremental process which gets more and more
granular over time. Separation into specific compounds - like fuels -
can be done chemically or biologically to some degree. Eventually the
intractable waste will need to be either incinerated at high
temperatures or encapsulated/vitrified and buried like nuclear waste.
OpenAI is written in Python and that tells me Python is the language
which will drive a lot of ML/AI work in the foreseeable. It isn't a
silver bullet for sure but if waste sorting is ever to be done by
autonomous swarms of robots it will probably be part of the solution.
I just did a bit of googling and see this idea is old hat really. It is
being done already.
Oh well ...
Cheers
Mike
Tim
On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 9:43 AM Mike Dewhirst <mi...@dewhirst.com.au
<mailto:mi...@dewhirst.com.au>> wrote:
On 2/08/2018 5:07 PM, Andrew Stuart wrote:
I’d like to see the packaging industry ended - or at least stop making
single use wrappers. The core problem is not reusing waste, it’s that we
manufacture an infinite amount of the stuff and every day the packaging
industry (actually the garbage manufacturing industry) pours out never ending
tonnage of more. We’re drowning in garbage but still paying the packaging
industry to keep making it. Sorry that’s nothing to do with Python.
Andrew
You may be entirely correct. However, until we get to a point
where wrappers actually are obsolete we need to clean them up and
prevent them from polluting.
Robots can learn to clean up for us. That is what I think it has
to do with Python :)
Mike
On 2 Aug 2018, at 4:42 pm, Mike Dewhirst<mi...@dewhirst.com.au>
<mailto:mi...@dewhirst.com.au> wrote:
Hi all!
I attended a dangerous goods meeting yesterday and most of the time was
spent discussing waste.
Some contractors who can no longer ship waste to China now pay a few months
rent in advance for a factory, stack it to the roof with waste and when no more
can be squeezed in they disappear leaving the landlord to sort it out. Too
often, spontaneous combustion works its magic first and the Fire Service has to
respond.
The scientific consensus was that we need a war on waste.
I was reminded of that Mumbai documentary which showed hordes of children
sorting through vast piles of waste extracting sellable stuff.
It occurs to me that all the consumption care in the world (today's world
anyway) isn't going to cut the mustard. We need armies of robots which can
learn to recognise recyclable material. They can be specialised, small, medium
and large. They can have gas detectors, spectrum analysers and other sniffers
and detectors to help.
Eventually I see waste mountains being broken down into more granularly
unique substances and chemical processes used for the hard-to-extract stuff. In
(unproven) theory some of the waste should be convertable into energy to
recharge the robot batteries and power their collaboration networks.
Even if some of the recovered materials were not worth selling they could
be stored until someone thought of a use for them. House-bricks?
I wonder if any of you inventive pyfolk think the world needs swarms of
intelligent waste converters?
Its an idea but with a self-organising collective it might become a project!
Cheers
Mike
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--
Tim K
Jersey, CI
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