[PLUG-TALK] Recycling with IT, Re: Amazon shipping ...

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Tue Feb 19 22:13:09 UTC 2019


On Sat, 16 Feb 2019, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYux4-KIY1o

On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 12:54:10PM -0800, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> 
> Then ask those same folks to search the Internet for "Operation
> National Sword" (and perhaps the movie "Plastic China") for the
> reasons that much of what we "recyle" now ends up in landfills
> anyway.

This is an IT and Maker opportunity.  

Imagine a reusable form of the Amazon shipping bags; the
bags won't have printed labels, instead a permanent
QR code and an RFID tag, which is associated online with 
"need-to-know" metadata when the bag is filled and shipped.  

When the recipient empties the bag, it goes back to the
mailbox for collection and return, cleaning and reuse.
This is mostly a data infrastructure problem.

Also, imagine designing a class of recycling machines made
from elements of recycled scrap.  Consumer and commercial
devices should be made from QR-coded components; after
discard, the components are separated and dispersed to
sites that test and redistribute them to sites which
assemble new machines from the components that still work.
In the end, all the atoms still work, but I hope we can
re-use the atoms in larger groups.

This requires a vast amount of design and coordination.
Nature figured this out eons ago; I am a bio-machine made
of recycled molecular components of billions of generations
of past lifeforms.  Recycling human artifacts is mostly a
computing and design automation problem.  Perhaps a game
design problem;  I hopew we can harness the billions of
hours of pattern matching and button frobbing that we
call "gaming" and get something useful done instead.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com



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