How long mined metals circulate before being lost | Hacker News Reader

How long mined metals circulate before being lost

arstechnica.com

57 pointsArchelaos31 comments

Here is the figure from the actual nature article that shows the lifetimes by metal:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-average-lifetimes-of...

This is really cool- some times i would lament that we are switchint to plastic, and people lament 'but plastix is so much more CO2 efficient, less energy intesive..'

But average lifetime of Iron is over 100 years, whats average lifetime of plastic, considerong much is single use, one week?

You going to use iron bags?? Iron bottles??

I mean, steel wire baskets are a thing, but I prefer a canvas bag. Glass is better for bottles and can be reusable, not merely recyclable.

I dream of a reusable glass bottle set. We could have basic designs such as wine, beer, short wide, tall narrow, etc. Like some areas have a tax on plastic bags, we could add a tax on goods sold in non-resusble and non compliant packaging.

Denmark has standard DS 53 for a reusable beer or soda bottle. They are very common in bars, and beer sold in supermarkets. Soda in supermarkets tends to be in plastic bottles or cans.

According to this very old report, in the 1990s these bottles were refilled 35 times on average. (Much of the report is very outdated.)

https://ec.europa.eu/environment/pdf/waste/studies/packaging...

Most active breweries in the US will fill glass bottles in two standard sizes of 64oz ("growler"; a bit shy of 2L) or 32oz ("mini-growler", 1L). Sometimes they will only fill growlers you originally bought from them but IME most will fill any growler you bring in. They're great to bring to parties instead of a six-pack. So at least within one area, your idea is already implemented---it'd be a good start to build on.

Recycling aluminum cans costs less energy than recycling glass bottles. Aluminum cans are also lighter for a given volume of liquid than glass, and they don't break.

You are right that re-using bottles takes less energy than recycling. You can re-use both glass and plastic bottles. Germany is a country with an extensive system of bottle re-use. But it's quite the logistical challenge to set up from scratch.

Glass bottles would be mostly reused, not recycled. This brings me back to the time where finding a weird taste in your coke bottle (some doofus used it to hold gasoline in an emergency), finding an insect in your drink (not thoroughly washed), the lip breaking (bottle capped without checking for wear), etc. happened sometimes.

In an industrial scale, it takes a lot of effort to make sure glass bottles are fit for reuse.

Bags made of fine chain mail? Sure, why not?

For one thing they are a lot heavier and more expensive than plant fibers.

But the average lifespan of iron says very little about how long it would last as a bag like this. Rust like many things occurs on the surface, combine friction between the links with lots of surface area and it’s not going to last anything like 100 years.

Thanks, that was what I was looking for. The lifetimes are pretty much unsurprising, but I didn't expect so little difference between the primary production of Fe/Al and the rest.

Barium certainly sticks out and I wouldn't have expected gold to be roughly a third of iron. I would also have expected copper before nickel.

The production chart is log scale. Fe shows as more than 100,000x the production of Au.

Uh, oh, I totally missed that. Thanks.

I'm surprised how much Barium gets produced annually, given the limited applications mentioned on the Wikipedia page.

From what I can tell it's mostly used for drilling. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barium_sulfate and https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/molecule-of-the-week/arch...

Not lost, just sitting in a landfill somewhere probably, waiting to be mined again.

A percentage is also lost in a way that is not and will never be economically feasible to recover, ie oxidized and dissolved in the sea. Although this research is probably done in good faith, it's going to (renewably) fuel all the alarmist environmentalists that don't understand the first thing about mining and resources. We cannot live in a closed system, nothing can, and we will perish if we go around stopping all industrial progress in the name of an unachievable circular economy ideal. Some resources are scarce and limited as far as we know and with current extraction costa, but the solution is not to stop using them. We use them for a reason. Imagine if the industrial revolution never happened because they were concerned that in 200 years the sea level would rise 3 meters and damage their crops. In a way, this is where we are. There is a lot of earth crust and a lot of minerals around. Luckily, by the time we run out we'll have already colonized most of the solar system.

> Luckily, by the time we run out we'll have already colonized most of the solar system.

I tend to agree with the first part, but am reluctant to fully agree due to this last part. If it was true that we have enough to last us up until we colonize the solar system, then maybe the first part would be fine. This assumes that colonising the solar system is even possible, and that we have enough energy available on earth to even do this.

I'm doubtful about colonising - and even if we create colonies it's likely they will remain small and dependant on earth for at least some supplies.

However there is a Lot of rock in the solar system that could be mined, and its possible, perhaps even probable, that these resources would supply earth with metals for quite some time.

I have no doubt that supply chains will remain interlinked, but if our civilization begins to actively exploit a significant portion of the resources in the solar system, then large-scale colonization is necessary and inevitable (although not necessarily human.)

> This assumes that colonising the solar system is even possible, and that we have enough energy available on earth to even do this.

The sun will provide plenty of energy for quite a while to come.

Future prospector searching for veins of iPads. There's gold in them hills

I suspect anyone who thinks landfills will ever be mined in the future has never been to a landfill.

If you want to recover metals from garbage, it's much easier if you burn it rather than bury it.

It gets much more efficient if you do a few basic things. Like separating food and garden waste into its own stream. Avoiding wasteful practices to reduce volume. Setting up closed loop manufacturing for commonly used items like milk containers.

With regard to metals, probably the biggest impact that won't happen on its own without consumer and regulatory pressure is to get the manufacturers to take back electronic devices and reclaim the metals that they use.

At that point there's various chemical methods to extract/separate metals from the plastic. Burning is possibly an option for the final remaining hard to disentangle parts but a few simple up front decisions can make items easy to disassemble for re-use in a standard 80/20 split.

One neat trick is to recycle batteries that are a mix of elements, but not bother to separate the elements, then sell the mix to someone who needs roughly that mix of elements anyway, like battery manufacturers. Saves time/effort and energy. Small additions can rebalance it.

I take the graph as being related to what percentage of the final item is that metal. If you make something that's 99% iron then recycling can happen more easily without up front planning than .01% gold mixed in with all sorts of other stuff.

Landfills are made of garbage and soil. If we had suitable tools, that would take far less energy to sort through than ore. The future waits only on better tools.

Mercury is released to the environment in the chloralkali process.

I miss old PCs being on the curb. They don't exist anymore on the side of the road where I live. There was a time when it was common to see TRS80s with 8 inch drives next to the cans. Maybe it was less common than my memories, but I just remember seeing gold for anyone to take.

Did you take them? Did you get any gold?

I used to hang out with a scrapper, and one time he cleaned out an old marine supply warehouse. lots of 60s-70s era mil spec parts. we went through the whole lot and separated out the gold. ended up with about 10 lbs of plated pins. paid out less than an oz I think.

if I hadn't scored a bunch of brass enclosures and old panel glasswork and indicators it totally wouldn't have been worth it.

I see randomly getting old machines to work as gold because it's one of the rags to riches back doors to the tech world.

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