I think I'm sitting on a pretty nifty idea.Of course, I haven't got the brain power or expertise to put it together, but at least I can throw the idea out there to hopefully inspire all of you. :-)
You know how sorting recyclables is a drag? We should be washing out those bottles and peeling the labels off the cans. But of course, many of us don't do a very good job at that.
Thankfully, waste management personnel clean up after us. But it's a terribly annoying process for ALL of us, and if we're going to recycle more in the future to save this planet, then it's only going to get MORE time consuming.
My suggestion is that we develop technology to sort recyclables on a molecular level instead of a physical one.
The process would go something like this:
All trash from a given community could be placed into one giant receiving kiln. As the temperature increases in the kiln, all water would turn into vapor at the same time, putting H20 molecules into the air which could then be sucked down a special tube chamber.
Paper would burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, thus peeling the labels off of thousands of soup cans within minutes. Glass types and metals each burn at different temperatures also, thus quickly sorting the brown glass from the clear kind and the aluminum from the tin.
But more than heat would be needed in this high-tech sorting process. Due to the over-abundance of dangerous chemicals that would surely be dancing around the inside of that kiln, we'd need to zap the resulting compounds with a particle-accelerating electron gun, breaking the chemical bonds that link the compounds together.For example, the ash from the burned papers would be zapped into--let's say--Carbon and Phosphorous atoms. Perhaps the nasty, poisonous fumes from the plastics would be zapped and thus broken into Silicon, Argon, Helium, and Xenon atoms.
The resulting array of atoms could then be sorted by their elemental categories (the same which we see on the Periodic Table of the Elements) by our simple understanding that each element has a different atomic weight and other such properties, reacting to changes in the kiln environment differently. By reacting similarly, the atoms would--in essence--group themselves, just as how birds of a feather flock together naturally. The result could be as many as 117 different full collection chambers, each to represent the 117 blocks are on our Periodic Table.
My favorite professor (Dr. Mone) once told me that every single element known to man can be extracted from sea water, as long as you had about one cubic meter of it. But we've got plenty of trash to extract from!
So let's "pan for gold" from this lovely molecular sorting kiln of which I dream!
