"Pete C" wrote in message
...
The really big problem of recycling, is how to break teh materials
down
to the cionstituent parts. Nio amount of recycling that doesn't
involve
e.g. more energy than making from scratch is going to make a clear
glass
bottle from a green one.

No, you recycle green glass into green bottles, etc etc

Does this actually happen, though? I read a piece in The Independent
last year about glass recylcing which said that coloured glass currently
ends up in landfill anyway.

"N. Thornton" wrote in message
om...
"Owain" wrote in message
...
"Pete C" wrote
| Might be better to give people a small discount off their
| council tax if they recycle, more of a carrot than a stick
| approach.
| Still we need a good way of encouraging us lazy brits to
| catch up with our continental cousins somehow.

Perhaps we could start by the council collecting the rubbish every week
in
the first place. And picking up the rubbish that spills out of ripped
binbags when they haven't collected it for three weeks.

Owain

Heck if they collected it every 2 weeks I'd do it. Here they just take
the p, making the system unworkable. Sorry but I'm not willing to have
big piles of rubbish mount up for 1 month plus, taking it in and out
hoping they'll collect it some day. I'm on the verge of giving up
rubbish recycling altogether. Theyre just not willing to take the
stuff.

Here they have a re-cycling scheme. I don't bother as it is needless.

"Andrew Heggie" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 2 Apr 2004 17:25:59 +0100, "IMM" wrote:


External combustion Stirling engines are the best for power generation.
Do
a web search and tons of stuff comes up.


Maybe if you mean steam not stirling. Define best, is it maximum
conversion of heat energy to electricity, minimum capital cost,
minimum operating cost or what?

The Stlirling has the edge on this.

Pete C wrote:

On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 08:20:47 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:


The points are broadly these.

(i) It doesn't take a lot of energy to make paper and its overall carbon
neutral when you burn it. Taking it miles on congested highways to
recycling plants is a lot more wasteful of fuel than buring it to heat
hoses where it becomnes 'waste'. Its much easier to process known
quality terees than to procvess a load of assorted much full of god
knows what fillers etc etc and you can't make high grade paper out of
waste paper.


Processing trees into pulp requires far more effort, energy and
transportation than turning waste paper back into pulp. And newsprint
and cardboard packaging do not require high grade paper and so can use
a high proportion of recycled material.



I din;t think that they do require more effort. There is little
difference between smashing up a tree and shredding waste paper.

It requires very similar effort.

In general, tress happening to grow in one place and mills and paper
planst being located close, it takes less effort to transport, and then
usually over purpose made raods pf low grade that do not interfere with
other traffic.


Once made into paper, its bulk transport to paper suppliers. Not
thousands of little journeys to collect. Its bad enough that all this
papaer has to be dispersed to every man woman and child in the country -
lets not repeat the mistake of collecting it all up again and bringing
it back to the one or two paper mills.

It is agreed that bog rolls etc can use recycled paper, but the fact
that this is as expensive as ordinary paper reflects the fact that the
actual costs of using the free material do not differ markedly from the
free trees that are grown and cut down to make ordinary paper.

Most paper is grown from trees grown specifically for the purpose
harvested on very marginal land that is bugger all use for anything
else. E.g. Scandinavia. No irrecplaceable tropical rain firests are used.



(ii) the transport issues are killers for bottles. Bottles if smashed up
and tossed in teh sea turn into shingle in no time and get recycled
rather well. It takes more energy to take a bottle to a recycling plant
- even to a bottle bank - than it does to bury it nearby.


Transporting bottles to the coast and chucking them in is not really a
sensible way of recycling them, you might as well transport them to a
recycling plant instead.


I agree. What is needed is a household bottle smasher that reduces them
to sharp sand. I could use that. In fact for my garden a finely ground
mixture of bottle sand, shredded wood and paper, and a bit of organic
muck like potato peelings, would be the best of all possible mulches.

I was only pointing out that bottles are not especially hard to deal
with. They degrade gracefully into sand.




Nearly all plastics and papers are suitable for high temperature
incineration, and high temperature incinerators are quite easy to make
clean and safe and do localises rubbish disposal. Recycling planst are
by contrast less easy to do locally and need fairly massive investment.


They don't need investment, the facilities for recycling glass, cans
and paper exists already.



Yes, but to be economic in a micro scale they are large and infrequent.
Thus the cost of getting materials to them - borne by the taxpayer - is
large.

Whereas local incinerators powering small generating sets and maybe
heting shools, hostpitals and colleges, would be much better.

Only metals are worth recycling IMHO. And only toxic metals - Lead,
Cadmium, etc - are really bad news to bury.






And tehre is always teh cost of transport of the waste to the processing
plant.


Little more than transporting them to landfill or an incinerator.


Not if you look at the locations and economies of scale of waste
re-processing plants - which I did, briefly, once.





The really big problem of recycling, is how to break teh materials down
to the cionstituent parts. Nio amount of recycling that doesn't involve
e.g. more energy than making from scratch is going to make a clear glass
bottle from a green one.


No, you recycle green glass into green bottles, etc etc


So someone has to sort them out. More expense.




Nature is the best recycler in the world. Landfill is a great way to let
nature use the next few millionyears to turn a miuntain of bottles back
into sand again.


Suitable places for landfill are already in short supply, less
suitable places do exist but there are risks involved.


Actually the whole of teh east coast is falling into teh sea. Onefeels
that a few million tonnes of bottles dumped around there might actually
stop it.

The provblems of waste disoposal are not being addressed properly, but
the eco knee jerk 'recycle everything' is typical of the facile one
dimesnional thinking of most political correctness.



My basic thesis is to rediuce the distance the waste has to travel as
far as possible, and not pussy foot around.

(i)plastic gets burnt in CHP.

(ii) Organic materials either get burnt as above, or shredded for
composting. That includes wood, paper, domestic and commercial food
waste etc.

(iii) Metals get recycled as they are valuable enough and in some cases
dangerous enough to make landfill not a good idea.

(v) Glass gets ground up into sand.




The trouble is that all these silly environmentalists think that by
loading up their volvos with a ton of waste paper and using a couple of
gallons of fuel to drive them to the wate paper site, they are
benefitting the eco system.


This is a typical can't do attitude, suprising from someone who calls
themself a natural philosopher. Most supermarkets have collection
points for glass, paper and cans, so there is no need to use extra
fuel taking them there.


Asssuming you actually go there in the first place.

I am looking fowradd to teh time when Tesco Direct or Waitrose Direct
bring the stuff in, and the bin men remove the residue. Ehy should I
actually need to get in a car at all?




cheers,
Pete.

Andrew Heggie wrote:

On Fri, 2 Apr 2004 17:25:59 +0100, "IMM" wrote:


External combustion Stirling engines are the best for power generation. Do
a web search and tons of stuff comes up.



Maybe if you mean steam not stirling. Define best, is it maximum
conversion of heat energy to electricity, minimum capital cost,
minimum operating cost or what?


Don't confuse the little chappie. You know his brain has only got as far
as 'two legs bad, 4 legs good'



AJH

Andrew Heggie wrote:

On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 08:08:48 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:



No. Turbines are very effecient beasties. More efficient than stirlings.


Yes but stirlings aren't at all efficient in converting high grade
heat to movement. Their potential lies in cleanliness and long working
life.

I think diesels still win hands down on anything except combined cycle
systems, and they can also be enhanced by this. High speed diesels
will exceed 40% conversion of heat to electricity, low speed ones
(burning even cheaper fuel) nearly reach 50%.



I thnk you are optimistic there frankly.


It's scalability that's difficult with CHP. None of the current
generating technologies scale down well or have particularly good
performance when turned down. Small alternators are inherently less
efficient than larger once because of engineering tolerances and
magnetic losses.



I beg to differ. Its not the alternators that are the problem. I can
show you a 2 oz generator that is at least 80% efficient. Its the
engines that drive them.



"Good" chp systems seem to feature loads in the MW levels and minimum
loads approaching 1/3 of peak loads. They feature multiple engines
running in their peak efficiency regions, as loads increase more
engines are brought online, the price is the higher O+M costs of
reciprocating engines. They also make use of both the coolant and
exhaust heat, for heating and cooling via adsorption coolers. As
someone else said more electricity is used worldwide for cooling than
heating, intuitively this is because most heating is by non electrical
means.


I actually doubt the above, on nearly every point.

The reason that generating sets are usually in the MW capacity is that teh

capital cost per megawatt is lower for larger sets. Not efficiency per se.


Building a big condensor takes about as many man hours as building a
little one. So costs do not scale lineraly with size.

When CHP in toto is looked at, if you can utilise the waste heat for
something that saves electricity, inefficiency in the thermo-electrical
conversion is not so serious. Water at 30C is almost useless for
extracting mechanical energy from, but makes fine underfloor or
undersoil heating for e.g. greenhouses.

I also challenge the 'more electricity is used for cooling than heating'
- this may well be so in e.g. the south west USA, but in my house the
electricity all goes into heat actually - lights, cookers, computers -
it all ends up heating the house. Ultimately all electricity ends up as
heat one way or another, or in the construction of e.g. some material
like Aluminium, which represents a potentially burnable material that
would release iheat if burnt.



At the MW(e) level you are buying your prime energy at industrial
rates, which will be half to a sixth what a small domestic user will
be charged.



I think not. I think the base cost of generating in the most efficient
sets is around 2p per Kw/h. Not far off domestic night rates.


AJH

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Andrew Heggie wrote:

On Fri, 2 Apr 2004 17:25:59 +0100, "IMM" wrote:


External combustion Stirling engines are the best for power generation.
Do
a web search and tons of stuff comes up.



Maybe if you mean steam not stirling. Define best, is it maximum
conversion of heat energy to electricity, minimum capital cost,
minimum operating cost or what?

Stirling for low usage is all of them.

Don't confuse the little chappie. You know his brain has only got as far
as 'two legs bad, 4 legs good'

Our troll is at it again. Please go back to alt.Yorkshire.

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember "IMM" saying
something like:

That's a wonderful way of wasting the precious resource of clean water.


It's the same water being pumped from tank to tank. Pay attention.

Being driven by mains water. In your own description.
--

Dave

"Grimly Curmudgeon" wrote in message
...
It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember "IMM" saying
something like:

That's a wonderful way of wasting the precious resource of clean water.


It's the same water being pumped from tank to tank. Pay attention.

Being driven by mains water. In your own description.

Read it again. No waste water. pay attention!!!!!!!!!!

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher
saying something like:

It is agreed that bog rolls etc can use recycled paper,

No thanks. Tried it before and the washing machine got all clogged up.
--

Dave

On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 22:44:58 +0100, "IMM" wrote:


"Pete C" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 21:48:43 +0100, "IMM" wrote:

Much better to recycle as much as possible, and consider incinerating
the rest.

No it isn't Research proved re-cycling a silly idea.

And whose research is this? Your own?

Read all the thread again. Nothing has sunk in with you. Do you make money
fro re-cycling?

Money is no problem for me. The only reseach I've seen you quote is
some 'expert' on the telly. Scientific reseach and watching telly
aren't the same y'know....

cheers,
Pete.

On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 22:48:09 +0100, "IMM" wrote:

Get the big picture. The snotty uni one is saying that re-cycling is a daft
idea to burning it and using the heat.

I know. And?

cheers,
Pete.

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004 10:24:03 +0100, "Neil Jones"
wrote:


"Pete C" wrote in message
.. .
The really big problem of recycling, is how to break teh materials
down
to the cionstituent parts. Nio amount of recycling that doesn't
involve
e.g. more energy than making from scratch is going to make a clear
glass
bottle from a green one.

No, you recycle green glass into green bottles, etc etc

Does this actually happen, though? I read a piece in The Independent
last year about glass recylcing which said that coloured glass currently
ends up in landfill anyway.


Doubt it, can you find anything on the web that backs this up?

cheers,
Pete.

On Mon, 05 Apr 2004 10:43:44 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Pete C wrote:

On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 08:20:47 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Processing trees into pulp requires far more effort, energy and
transportation than turning waste paper back into pulp. And newsprint
and cardboard packaging do not require high grade paper and so can use
a high proportion of recycled material.

I din;t think that they do require more effort. There is little
difference between smashing up a tree and shredding waste paper.

It requires very similar effort.

Well you need to plant the trees, then cut them down, collect them
from halfway up a mountain/hillside and take them to a pulp mill.
Although this is highly mechanised it is likely to require more effort
than collecting paper from recycling banks.

In general, tress happening to grow in one place and mills and paper
planst being located close,
it takes less effort to transport, and then
usually over purpose made raods pf low grade that do not interfere with
other traffic.

As a lot of paper is imported from Scandanavia, this requires much
more transportation than recycled paper. Also transportation of stuff
for recycling is a vanishingly small proportion of road traffic, the
traffic problems in this country stem from other causes.

Once made into paper, its bulk transport to paper suppliers. Not
thousands of little journeys to collect. Its bad enough that all this
papaer has to be dispersed to every man woman and child in the country -
lets not repeat the mistake of collecting it all up again and bringing
it back to the one or two paper mills.

If the majority of people bring it to recycling banks then it requires
very little transportation.

It is agreed that bog rolls etc can use recycled paper, but the fact
that this is as expensive as ordinary paper reflects the fact that the
actual costs of using the free material do not differ markedly from the
free trees that are grown and cut down to make ordinary paper.

ROFL!!! I would expect (or hope) that loo roll accounts for a very
small proportion of paper use in this country! )) The majority of
pulp is used for newsprint and packaging and it is much more economic
to use a high proportion of recycled material in it's manufacture.
Making high quality products from 100% recycled material requires a
bit more processing so the cost reflects that.

Most paper is grown from trees grown specifically for the purpose
harvested on very marginal land that is bugger all use for anything
else. E.g. Scandinavia. No irrecplaceable tropical rain firests are used.

Sure but it would be better to grow higher quality wood for furniture,
building and DIY than use matchstick wood for making paper pulp and
everything else.

Transporting bottles to the coast and chucking them in is not really a
sensible way of recycling them, you might as well transport them to a
recycling plant instead.


I agree. What is needed is a household bottle smasher that reduces them
to sharp sand. I could use that. In fact for my garden a finely ground
mixture of bottle sand, shredded wood and paper, and a bit of organic
muck like potato peelings, would be the best of all possible mulches.

I'd expect that using ground glass as a gardening material garden has
more safety risks than benefits!

I was only pointing out that bottles are not especially hard to deal
with. They degrade gracefully into sand.

Not in a landfill. Why chuck them away or incinerate them and use raw
sand for new bottles instead of melting the old bottles down?

Nearly all plastics and papers are suitable for high temperature
incineration, and high temperature incinerators are quite easy to make
clean and safe and do localises rubbish disposal. Recycling planst are
by contrast less easy to do locally and need fairly massive investment.


They don't need investment, the facilities for recycling glass, cans
and paper exists already.

Yes, but to be economic in a micro scale they are large and infrequent.
Thus the cost of getting materials to them - borne by the taxpayer - is
large.

If most people would take stuff to a recycling bank then the
transportation cost would be about the same as for using raw materials
instead.

Whereas local incinerators powering small generating sets and maybe
heting shools, hostpitals and colleges, would be much better.

The energy gained by incinerating all waste is less the energy saving
from recycling a high proportion of it.

Only metals are worth recycling IMHO. And only toxic metals - Lead,
Cadmium, etc - are really bad news to bury.

Or incinerate I would have thought. Although modern incinerators
operate within emissions limits it does't mean they are emissions
free.

And tehre is always teh cost of transport of the waste to the processing
plant.


Little more than transporting them to landfill or an incinerator.


Not if you look at the locations and economies of scale of waste
re-processing plants - which I did, briefly, once.

Well things move on...

The really big problem of recycling, is how to break teh materials down
to the cionstituent parts. Nio amount of recycling that doesn't involve
e.g. more energy than making from scratch is going to make a clear glass
bottle from a green one.


No, you recycle green glass into green bottles, etc etc


So someone has to sort them out. More expense.

Only if we want to pay someone to do it for us. Most people are
capable of taking stuff to a recyling bank and it doesn't take more
than a minute or two to put things in the correct bin. If people don't
want to do this themselves and would rather pay someone else to do it
through higher council taxes then that's their choice.

Suitable places for landfill are already in short supply, less
suitable places do exist but there are risks involved.


Actually the whole of teh east coast is falling into teh sea. Onefeels
that a few million tonnes of bottles dumped around there might actually
stop it.

LOL!!! I would have thought that a few miles of eroding coastline is
better than a vast tract of broken glass being washed around by the
sea! Coastal erosion is a natural process, without it there would be
no white cliffs of Dover. If it really is a problem then it's possible
to build sea defences.

The provblems of waste disoposal are not being addressed properly, but
the eco knee jerk 'recycle everything' is typical of the facile one
dimesnional thinking of most political correctness.

No-one expects us to recycle everything but it certainly worthwhile
recyling more than we do, as is done on the continent already.

My basic thesis is to rediuce the distance the waste has to travel as
far as possible, and not pussy foot around.

Transport isn't the main problem, anyway...

(i)plastic gets burnt in CHP.

(ii) Organic materials either get burnt as above, or shredded for
composting. That includes wood, paper, domestic and commercial food
waste etc.

(iii) Metals get recycled as they are valuable enough and in some cases
dangerous enough to make landfill not a good idea.

(v) Glass gets ground up into sand.

Sounds doable, but this still requires the waste to be separated, and
once you go that far you might as well recycle what you can.

This is a typical can't do attitude, suprising from someone who calls
themself a natural philosopher. Most supermarkets have collection
points for glass, paper and cans, so there is no need to use extra
fuel taking them there.


Asssuming you actually go there in the first place.

I am looking fowradd to teh time when Tesco Direct or Waitrose Direct
bring the stuff in, and the bin men remove the residue. Ehy should I
actually need to get in a car at all?

I was only using that as one illustration to show that extra fuel use
is unnecessary. Most people make regular journeys by car at some point
so with a _small_ amount of preplanning and effort could take stuff to
recycling banks without going out of their way.

cheers,
Pete.

"Pete C" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 22:44:58 +0100, "IMM" wrote:


"Pete C" wrote in message
news
On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 21:48:43 +0100, "IMM" wrote:

Much better to recycle as much as possible, and consider
incinerating
the rest.

No it isn't Research proved re-cycling a silly idea.

And whose research is this? Your own?

Read all the thread again. Nothing has sunk in with you. Do you make
money
fro re-cycling?

Money is no problem for me. The only reseach I've seen you quote is
some 'expert' on the telly. Scientific reseach and watching telly
aren't the same y'know....

I've read quite a bit. And this man really put the case across super well.
Re-cycling is a silly idea. I suspect councils and governments like it
because it gives the impression they are doing something and care. Which is
********.

"Pete C" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 22:48:09 +0100, "IMM" wrote:

Get the big picture. The snotty uni one is saying that re-cycling is a
daft
idea to burning it and using the heat.

I know. And?

If you know then why re you prattling balls.

On Mon, 05 Apr 2004 23:33:11 +0100, Pete C
wrote:

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004 10:24:03 +0100, "Neil Jones"
wrote:


"Pete C" wrote in message
. ..
The really big problem of recycling, is how to break teh materials
down
to the cionstituent parts. Nio amount of recycling that doesn't
involve
e.g. more energy than making from scratch is going to make a clear
glass
bottle from a green one.

No, you recycle green glass into green bottles, etc etc

Does this actually happen, though? I read a piece in The Independent
last year about glass recylcing which said that coloured glass currently
ends up in landfill anyway.


Doubt it, can you find anything on the web that backs this up?

I've seen it being tipped at a landfill site. Unfortunately I didn't
have my camera with me.....




..andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

The Natural Philosopher wrote in message ...
N. Thornton wrote:

Its possible. Glass is infinirely resusable, but you cannot take out the
admixtures used to crate it in the first place. In time it probably
means all bottles end up a muddy brown.

When I spoke to the glass people they said broken glass couldnt be
reused because the different pieces had different thermal expansion
coefficients, and anything made with mixed broken glass would
inevitably crack on cooling. Websites said the same thing.


Strikes me that a lot of emphasis is being put on recycling but not
enough on re-use. For the most part the reuse ideas around seem pretty
naive, but there are more sensible ways to do it too. I idly came up
with several possibilities, which of course may or may not stand up to
further scrutiny.


Nearly all our waste is packaging materials.
Or marketing collateral.
Basically its tins, bottles, pots, wrappers etc etc.

The odd bit of building material from the endless DIY...
The food scraps get composted, as does all garden watse.
Most wood gets burnt, one way or another.
So does a lot of the paper.
Its the things that useable things come in that need to be disposed off.


That we cant do a lot with. There is also a lot of other stuff that
needs disposing as well. Check out the local tip. Check out shop
refitters skips, whole shopfuls of... nope, trade secret that. A lot
of it is no use to anyone, but also a lot there are pracitcal ways to
reuse.


Regards, NT

"Set Square" wrote in message ...
N. Thornton wrote:
"David W.E. Roberts" wrote in message


Actually, I'd like to be able to generate *all* my electricity from
gas - not just in an emergency. Bearing in mind that the marginal
cost per kWHr
of
(on peak) electricity is 3.6 times that of gas, I would save on
fuel costs as long as the overall conversion efficiency was more
than about 27.5%

Is isnt, thats the problem. If you want efficiency you need complex
kit. OTOH you can get something to work with about a tenner plus a
ride to the auction. If you have unlimited time, and the expertise to
get old junk running.

What sort of old junk do you have in mind?

Any old internal combustion engine plus a car alternator are the heart
of any homemade genset. Lawnmowers appear ideal but have really quite
short lives, so some old farm junk is a better long term bet if its
salvageable. Mowers are fine if you only going to use them
occasionally, but if you want it running 24/7 a mower engine wont last
long.

For a fiver you wont get a wide choice of engines, basically anything
that has an ignition system still on it and hasnt seized solid should
do. Age immaterial.


On the carb side, the nicest idea I saw was a wood powered set that
had basically no carb at all. IIRC the wood was burnt in a drum with
the air sucked downwards throught it, creating wood gas, this was
bubbled through water to filter it, went through long pipes to cool
it, and fed the engine.

To start it you opened a drum bottom vent flap and lit the fire, and
once it began to take hold crank the IC engine and close the flap.

Water cools the woodgas first, then goes through the cooling jacket,
if the engine has one, then cools the exhaust output with a heat
exchanger. Result: lots of boiling water.

Now you have a wood powered genset with leccy and HW output. Cost to
buy a £10+, cost to run: nothing but time. A fun project if you want
to play.


Regards, NT

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember "IMM" saying
something like:


"Grimly Curmudgeon" wrote in message
.. .
It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember "IMM" saying
something like:

That's a wonderful way of wasting the precious resource of clean water.


It's the same water being pumped from tank to tank. Pay attention.

Being driven by mains water. In your own description.

Read it again. No waste water. pay attention!!!!!!!!!!

You could have a large tank at high level and one at low level. The mains
water turns the genny to produce power to heat a thermal store of water.
The genny turbine would have another pump on the same shaft. This pump,
pumps water from the low tank to the high level tank. When the high tank is
full the water from the high tank is released to turn the genny and flows
into the lower tank. Start all over again. You are getting the power to
raise the water free ( the water companies pumps in fact).

You're still wasting water; either from discharge into waste from the
driving turbine or, if that's discharged into the lower tank, then
pumped up to the upper tank to refill the lower tank. Either way you
have a surplus of a tankful of wasted water. Water that could have been
used to hold your head under.
--

Dave

N. Thornton wrote:
When I spoke to the glass people they said broken glass couldnt be
reused because the different pieces had different thermal expansion
coefficients, and anything made with mixed broken glass would
inevitably crack on cooling. Websites said the same thing.

So two different bottles couldn't end up combined in a new item? Can't
really see them separating the Stella bottles from the Hardys.
I'm sure if it's melted to liquid and mixed it can't be that different from
baking with a combination of plain & self raising flour.

Regards, NT

--
Toby.

'One day son, all this will be finished'

"Grimly Curmudgeon" wrote in message
...
It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember "IMM" saying
something like:


"Grimly Curmudgeon" wrote in message
.. .
It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember "IMM" saying
something like:

That's a wonderful way of wasting the precious resource of clean
water.


It's the same water being pumped from tank to tank. Pay attention.

Being driven by mains water. In your own description.

Read it again. No waste water. pay attention!!!!!!!!!!

You could have a large tank at high level and one at low level. The
mains
water turns the genny to produce power to heat a thermal store of
water.
The genny turbine would have another pump on the same shaft. This pump,
pumps water from the low tank to the high level tank. When the high tank
is
full the water from the high tank is released to turn the genny and flows
into the lower tank. Start all over again. You are getting the power to
raise the water free ( the water companies pumps in fact).

You're still wasting water; either from discharge into waste from the
driving turbine or,

The turbine/pump is driven by mains water which is the water you only use
for normal everyday function. No waste. It is obvious. Pay attention.
Draw a little sketch.

"N. Thornton" wrote in message
om...
"Set Square" wrote in message
...
N. Thornton wrote:
"David W.E. Roberts" wrote in message


Actually, I'd like to be able to generate *all* my electricity from
gas - not just in an emergency. Bearing in mind that the marginal
cost per kWHr
of
(on peak) electricity is 3.6 times that of gas, I would save on
fuel costs as long as the overall conversion efficiency was more
than about 27.5%

Is isnt, thats the problem. If you want efficiency you need complex
kit. OTOH you can get something to work with about a tenner plus a
ride to the auction. If you have unlimited time, and the expertise to
get old junk running.

What sort of old junk do you have in mind?

Any old internal combustion engine plus a car alternator are the heart
of any homemade genset. Lawnmowers appear ideal but have really quite
short lives, so some old farm junk is a better long term bet if its
salvageable. Mowers are fine if you only going to use them
occasionally, but if you want it running 24/7 a mower engine wont last
long.

For a fiver you wont get a wide choice of engines, basically anything
that has an ignition system still on it and hasnt seized solid should
do. Age immaterial.


On the carb side, the nicest idea I saw was a wood powered set that
had basically no carb at all. IIRC the wood was burnt in a drum with
the air sucked downwards throught it, creating wood gas, this was
bubbled through water to filter it, went through long pipes to cool
it, and fed the engine.

To start it you opened a drum bottom vent flap and lit the fire, and
once it began to take hold crank the IC engine and close the flap.

Water cools the woodgas first, then goes through the cooling jacket,
if the engine has one, then cools the exhaust output with a heat
exchanger. Result: lots of boiling water.

Now you have a wood powered genset with leccy and HW output. Cost to
buy a £10+, cost to run: nothing but time. A fun project if you want
to play.

You can use old fryer oil to run a diesel engine for next to nothing as the
burger chains give it away and are glad to see you take it it off their
hands, and the burn is super clear compared to fossil diesel fuel. Here is
how you do it.

Vegetable oil and biodiesel powered diesels at:
http://www.veggievan.org/discuss/


Renewable energy and sustainable living:
http://www.green-trust.org

"Pete C" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 5 Apr 2004 10:24:03 +0100, "Neil Jones"
wrote:


"Pete C" wrote in message
.. .
The really big problem of recycling, is how to break teh materials
down
to the cionstituent parts. Nio amount of recycling that doesn't
involve
e.g. more energy than making from scratch is going to make a clear
glass
bottle from a green one.

No, you recycle green glass into green bottles, etc etc

Does this actually happen, though? I read a piece in The Independent
last year about glass recylcing which said that coloured glass
currently
ends up in landfill anyway.


Doubt it, can you find anything on the web that backs this up?

cheers,
Pete.

I'm pretty sure it was this article:-

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/thi...p?story=314732

which was actually from 2002, not last year as I had thought. But I'm
not going to pay The Independent to reread an article I originally read
in a paper I paid for, so I can't post the actual quote.

Neil

Pete C wrote:


Well you need to plant the trees, then cut them down, collect them
from halfway up a mountain/hillside and take them to a pulp mill.
Although this is highly mechanised it is likely to require more effort
than collecting paper from recycling banks.



I guess thats why swamills make a profit and recyclimng plants don;t then



In general, tress happening to grow in one place and mills and paper
planst being located close,
it takes less effort to transport, and then
usually over purpose made raods pf low grade that do not interfere with
other traffic.


As a lot of paper is imported from Scandanavia, this requires much
more transportation than recycled paper. Also transportation of stuff
for recycling is a vanishingly small proportion of road traffic, the
traffic problems in this country stem from other causes.




Do your research and look at the costs of water trasportation versus
road. You will be surprised at how energy efficient a big fat container
ship is..


Once made into paper, its bulk transport to paper suppliers. Not
thousands of little journeys to collect. Its bad enough that all this
papaer has to be dispersed to every man woman and child in the country -
lets not repeat the mistake of collecting it all up again and bringing
it back to the one or two paper mills.


If the majority of people bring it to recycling banks then it requires
very little transportation.



And how, pray, do they get it there without transporting it?

Burining it in the home requires no transportation at all.



It is agreed that bog rolls etc can use recycled paper, but the fact
that this is as expensive as ordinary paper reflects the fact that the
actual costs of using the free material do not differ markedly from the
free trees that are grown and cut down to make ordinary paper.


ROFL!!! I would expect (or hope) that loo roll accounts for a very
small proportion of paper use in this country! )) The majority of
pulp is used for newsprint and packaging and it is much more economic
to use a high proportion of recycled material in it's manufacture.
Making high quality products from 100% recycled material requires a
bit more processing so the cost reflects that.


And more nergy usage ofcourse,. But never mind its RECYCLED. So it is
biund to cost more isn;t it.

Actually, in our hoise, apart from newspapers which I have given up but
tother half has not, the majoroity of paper we USE as opposed to get
free with things we want as (unnecessary) packaging is bog roll.




Most paper is grown from trees grown specifically for the purpose
harvested on very marginal land that is bugger all use for anything
else. E.g. Scandinavia. No irrecplaceable tropical rain firests are used.


Sure but it would be better to grow higher quality wood for furniture,
building and DIY than use matchstick wood for making paper pulp and
everything else.



You can't grow high quality wood in Scandinavia. Look at Ikea.

I agree. What is needed is a household bottle smasher that reduces them
to sharp sand. I could use that. In fact for my garden a finely ground
mixture of bottle sand, shredded wood and paper, and a bit of organic
muck like potato peelings, would be the best of all possible mulches.


I'd expect that using ground glass as a gardening material garden has
more safety risks than benefits!



Not if you grind it up enough. What is sand anyway except ground glass?



I was only pointing out that bottles are not especially hard to deal
with. They degrade gracefully into sand.


Not in a landfill.


You ned to wait a bit longer that all till the next ice age.

I cannot imagine why God filled the earth with all this rock and stuff.
And all those terrible heavy metals. very irresposnible.IMHO.



Why chuck them away or incinerate them and use raw
sand for new bottles instead of melting the old bottles down?


Because it takes just as much energy to do use the old ones, the quality
is less, and the bottles have to be transported to the rather large
plant where this can happen.

In short its politically correct ********. smash em up and use em as
hardcore.




Yes, but to be economic in a micro scale they are large and infrequent.
Thus the cost of getting materials to them - borne by the taxpayer - is
large.


If most people would take stuff to a recycling bank then the
transportation cost would be about the same as for using raw materials
instead.



Oh my gawd. Yiou reakly are as thicvk as IMM aren't yiu. The cost
oftransporting a caret of bottles ten miles VASTLY exceeds not only in
direct fuel and car costs, but also in congestion, the cost of running
teh same weight of dry sand from a quarry, by rail to a glass plant.

The ONLY virtue is that the cost is borne by the consumer, not the glass
plant. YOU are paying for a useless activity that only serves to make a
knee jerk PC guilt assuaging effect.





Whereas local incinerators powering small generating sets and maybe
heting shools, hostpitals and colleges, would be much better.


The energy gained by incinerating all waste is less the energy saving
from recycling a high proportion of it.



No, it isn't. NOT when the OVERALL cost benefit of recycling is actually
done.

Its as stupid as me driving 20 miles round trip to buy a bar of soap a
tescos because it is half the price there compared with the village shop.

What is the MAJOR use of carbon based fuel.
Transport, overwemlingly. I burn what - 1200 liters of fuel a year to
heat my house. Thats about 10,000 kilometers of travelling. 6,000 miles
a year. Who here does LESS than that? Personally. THEN add in all the
trucks and so on to get the goods to where you buy them.

If you want to save energy, stop using cars. Period. Use of cars to
transport rubbish is infnirely more wasteful of fuel and energy than
anything else, includng having a big tipper pick them up from your door.



Only metals are worth recycling IMHO. And only toxic metals - Lead,
Cadmium, etc - are really bad news to bury.


Or incinerate I would have thought. Although modern incinerators
operate within emissions limits it does't mean they are emissions
free.



Yes. One that we can agree. meatl oxides and salts in the air are very
bad news.




So someone has to sort them out. More expense.


Only if we want to pay someone to do it for us. Most people are
capable of taking stuff to a recyling bank and it doesn't take more
than a minute or two to put things in the correct bin. If people don't
want to do this themselves and would rather pay someone else to do it
through higher council taxes then that's their choice.


But why bother? Its a waste ofhman effort. Its like all those cans they
collected in teh last war for the War Effort. They tore down railings
for scrap. Not needed at all. PV ******** as usual. Made peo;le feel
good. Morale booster.

The world is dyng from CO2 poisoning. Panic. Lets take bottles to the
bottle bank and feel better, burning anothert gallon of petrol as we go.

********.





Suitable places for landfill are already in short supply, less
suitable places do exist but there are risks involved.


Actually the whole of teh east coast is falling into teh sea. Onefeels
that a few million tonnes of bottles dumped around there might actually
stop it.


LOL!!! I would have thought that a few miles of eroding coastline is
better than a vast tract of broken glass being washed around by the
sea!


Er, sorry to disappoint you, but what exactly do you think pebbles and
sand actually are, vast tracts of broken silicates washing around...have
you not ever stopped and picked up a peculialrly colored pebble, and
found it to be a piece of glass worn to pebble shape by the sea, with
the rest of it turned into nice sand?

Chucking bottles in the sea is actully a very sane idea. Use tidal power
to reduce then to pebbles and sand, then sell it back a decorative path
material a year later...



Coastal erosion is a natural process, without it there would be
no white cliffs of Dover. If it really is a problem then it's possible
to build sea defences.



Very expensive.

I am sure that throwing rubbish in the sea is a natural process too.

As mans extinction of the mammoth was...




The provblems of waste disoposal are not being addressed properly, but
the eco knee jerk 'recycle everything' is typical of the facile one
dimesnional thinking of most political correctness.


No-one expects us to recycle everything but it certainly worthwhile
recyling more than we do, as is done on the continent already.


No, I think it is probably better economics to recycle LESS.

Pints to tackle

(i) sack most of the marketing men and tax advertisemnets. HUGE net
saving in waste paper.

(ii) Abolish paper forms. And most of petrty local givernment, and fire
the existing government. Huge net savings in white paper and hot air.

(iii) make it a criminal offence to drive under the speed limit. That
should speed the roads up a bit.

(iv) Make it a criminal offence to drive kids to school. Or to drive to
teh supermarket. Have home delivery instead.

(v) offer huge tax relief on people who work from home. That should get
40% of the cars off the road.

(vi) Offer free collection on a timely basis of all packaging material.
Burn it to power the grid and the local school central heating system.
Sell the resultant chemical soup of burnt gases dissolved in water to
chemical plants, or just dump it in tanks. Or grind it up and compost
it. Or macerate it and flush it down the sewers - free transport to the
local sewage plant. Let them deal with it - they do already to a large
extent anyway.

(vii) Stop making things out of metal almost entirely. This is, by and
large, happening.


Rather than trying to sepnd huge amounts of effort recycling stuff we
don't want, why not simply not have it in the first place?

90% of all my post ends up straight in the bin, and 5% more ends up
there after being read. All the useless packaging does as well. A simple
resuable brown cardboard box is all you really need for 99% of things,
and that makes excellent garden compost.



My basic thesis is to rediuce the distance the waste has to travel as
far as possible, and not pussy foot around.


Transport isn't the main problem, anyway...


Trasnport is THE MAIN PROBLEM. TRANPORT BURNS ABOUT 65% OF FOSSIL FUEL
MOSTLY IN PRIVATE CARS. By not using the car to trasnport rubbish, there
is an immediate net gain. By using waste to generate heat there is
another. Burning fuel to transport rubbish is total ********.




(i)plastic gets burnt in CHP.

(ii) Organic materials either get burnt as above, or shredded for
composting. That includes wood, paper, domestic and commercial food
waste etc.

(iii) Metals get recycled as they are valuable enough and in some cases
dangerous enough to make landfill not a good idea.

(v) Glass gets ground up into sand.


Sounds doable, but this still requires the waste to be separated, and
once you go that far you might as well recycle what you can.



No, you might as well not. Because the recdyckling plamnst are far more
difficult to build and would be firher away than an incinerator.



This is a typical can't do attitude, suprising from someone who calls
themself a natural philosopher. Most supermarkets have collection
points for glass, paper and cans, so there is no need to use extra
fuel taking them there.


Asssuming you actually go there in the first place.

I am looking fowradd to teh time when Tesco Direct or Waitrose Direct
bring the stuff in, and the bin men remove the residue. Ehy should I
actually need to get in a car at all?


I was only using that as one illustration to show that extra fuel use
is unnecessary. Most people make regular journeys by car at some point
so with a _small_ amount of preplanning and effort could take stuff to
recycling banks without going out of their way.


BUT most people should NOT be making regular car trips for trivial
things like shopping for food.

THAT is how you sasve energy,

Two wrongs do not make a right.



cheers,
Pete.

Andy Hall wrote:

On Mon, 05 Apr 2004 23:33:11 +0100, Pete C
wrote:


On Mon, 5 Apr 2004 10:24:03 +0100, "Neil Jones"
wrote:


"Pete C" wrote in message
...

The really big problem of recycling, is how to break teh materials

down

to the cionstituent parts. Nio amount of recycling that doesn't

involve

e.g. more energy than making from scratch is going to make a clear

glass

bottle from a green one.

No, you recycle green glass into green bottles, etc etc


Does this actually happen, though? I read a piece in The Independent
last year about glass recylcing which said that coloured glass currently
ends up in landfill anyway.


Doubt it, can you find anything on the web that backs this up?


I've seen it being tipped at a landfill site. Unfortunately I didn't
have my camera with me.....


Yes, many councils that do not have huge landfill problems have
isntitired the par that costs the taxpayer monye - bringing bottles to
teh bank - but not teh part that costs them money - recycling.

MUCH essier to emty a bottle bank or five than 300 waste bins.


It costs YOU more, but looks good on teh tax bills. They can then spend
the money in installing more speed bumps in your raod so you can get to
burn more fuel negoitioating them, and buy new shock absorbers every 2
years instead of every 10...


Government exists promarily to justify its own existence. This is done
by creating 'issues' and using them as an excuse to raise taxes to
support yet more bureacrats, or line their own pockets. What is not
required is that problems of a real and urgent nature be solved. All
that is requied is that obvious efforts to solve them are apparently
being made...since there is now no education of an intellectual or
scientific nature, and the average person can no longer even add up
without a calculator, its easier to talk in pictures and fool everybody
all of the time.

So we have bottle banks. And ban hunting. Meanwhile we burn ever more
irreplaceable fuel on congested rodas making journets we don't need to
make, and fill out ever more paper forms to explain why we exceeeded teh
speed limit on the only clear stretch of road for 200 miles.

In short, the fgovernment and the powers that be respond only to media
pressure, not to actual calculations by sober men.


"Toujours bolleaux"






.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

N. Thornton wrote:

The Natural Philosopher wrote in message ...

N. Thornton wrote:


Its possible. Glass is infinirely resusable, but you cannot take out the
admixtures used to crate it in the first place. In time it probably
means all bottles end up a muddy brown.


When I spoke to the glass people they said broken glass couldnt be
reused because the different pieces had different thermal expansion
coefficients, and anything made with mixed broken glass would
inevitably crack on cooling. Websites said the same thing.



I thought that was what 'mixing' dies. Distrubutes everything uniformnly
throughthe mediem so it all ends up wwth the same coeefficient.

Anyway, one more nail in the bottle bank coffin. Glass it seems cant be
recycled...




Strikes me that a lot of emphasis is being put on recycling but not
enough on re-use. For the most part the reuse ideas around seem pretty
naive, but there are more sensible ways to do it too. I idly came up
with several possibilities, which of course may or may not stand up to
further scrutiny.



Nearly all our waste is packaging materials.
Or marketing collateral.
Basically its tins, bottles, pots, wrappers etc etc.

The odd bit of building material from the endless DIY...
The food scraps get composted, as does all garden watse.
Most wood gets burnt, one way or another.
So does a lot of the paper.
Its the things that useable things come in that need to be disposed off.



That we cant do a lot with. There is also a lot of other stuff that
needs disposing as well. Check out the local tip. Check out shop
refitters skips, whole shopfuls of... nope, trade secret that. A lot
of it is no use to anyone, but also a lot there are pracitcal ways to
reuse.


Yup. burn it and use the energy.



Regards, NT

On Tue, 06 Apr 2004 13:41:26 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Not if you grind it up enough. What is sand anyway except ground glass?

To quote your own advice: "Do some research."

John Schmitt

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
Pete C wrote:


Well you need to plant the trees, then cut them down, collect them
from halfway up a mountain/hillside and take them to a pulp mill.
Although this is highly mechanised it is likely to require more effort
than collecting paper from recycling banks.

I guess thats why swamills make a profit and recyclimng plants don;t then

In general, tress happening to grow in one place and mills and paper
planst being located close,
it takes less effort to transport, and then
usually over purpose made raods pf low grade that do not interfere with
other traffic.

As a lot of paper is imported from Scandanavia, this requires much
more transportation than recycled paper. Also transportation of stuff
for recycling is a vanishingly small proportion of road traffic, the
traffic problems in this country stem from other causes.

Do your research and look at the costs of water trasportation versus
road. You will be surprised at how energy efficient a big fat container
ship is..

When full. Trains are eco friendly when full too. When empty these are super
inefficient. Empty trains running around during the day is eco-unfriendly.

Actually the whole of teh east coast is falling into teh sea. Onefeels
that a few million tonnes of bottles dumped around there might actually
stop it.

I think not. The government should not spend any money on the likes of
Suffolk. This place should have been under the waves years ago, and quite
rightly so too.

LOL!!! I would have thought that a
few miles of eroding coastline is
better than a vast tract of broken glass
being washed around by the sea!

If dumped in sea valleys then all is OK. But that is in the middle of the
Atlantic and takes lots of energy to transport it there.

Coastal erosion is a natural process, without it there would be
no white cliffs of Dover. If it really is a problem then it's possible
to build sea defences.

Very expensive.

It has been suggested that a one mile causeway could be built between Dover
and France using waste from the UK, France and the Low countries. Take a
time, but possible. Then locks can be put on the UK side and we can charge
the earth to ships for using it.

No, I think it is probably better economics to recycle LESS.

Pints to tackle

(i) sack most of the marketing men and tax advertisemnets. HUGE net
saving in waste paper.

(ii) Abolish paper forms. And most of petrty local givernment, and fire
the existing government. Huge net savings in white paper and hot air.

(iii) make it a criminal offence to drive under the speed limit. That
should speed the roads up a bit.

(iv) Make it a criminal offence to drive kids to school. Or to drive to
teh supermarket. Have home delivery instead.

(v) offer huge tax relief on people who work from home. That should get
40% of the cars off the road.

(vi) Offer free collection on a timely basis of all packaging material.
Burn it to power the grid and the local school central heating system.
Sell the resultant chemical soup of burnt gases dissolved in water to
chemical plants, or just dump it in tanks. Or grind it up and compost
it. Or macerate it and flush it down the sewers - free transport to the
local sewage plant. Let them deal with it - they do already to a large
extent anyway.

(vii) Stop making things out of metal almost entirely. This is, by and
large, happening.


Rather than trying to sepnd huge amounts of effort recycling stuff we
don't want, why not simply not have it in the first place?

90% of all my post ends up straight in the bin, and 5% more ends up
there after being read. All the useless packaging does as well. A simple
resuable brown cardboard box is all you really need for 99% of things,
and that makes excellent garden compost.

Transport isn't the main problem, anyway...

Trasnport is THE MAIN PROBLEM. TRANPORT
BURNS ABOUT 65% OF FOSSIL FUEL
MOSTLY IN PRIVATE CARS. By not using the car
to trasnport rubbish, there is an immediate net gain.
By using waste to generate heat there is
another. Burning fuel to transport rubbish is total ********.

Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2 emitted is
neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate fossil
fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff. This
is nothing to the total size of the USA.

IMM wrote:

snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2 emitted is
neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate fossil
fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff. This
is nothing to the total size of the USA.



This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.

Nick Brooks

Nick Brooks wrote:
IMM wrote:

snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2
emitted is
neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate
fossil
fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff.
This
is nothing to the total size of the USA.



This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.

Nick Brooks

And despite the bad form of replying to my own post I've done some
calculations that suggest IMM may be mistaken

according to recent figures
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1.html

Total annual US fossil fuel consumption ammounts to 2.28 x 10^11 (ten to
the power of 11) Kw

105 square miles = 2.71 x 10^8 square meters

which means that each square meter would have to provide 84,000KW (yes
eighty four thousand kilowatts) annually

I don't think so

Nick Brooks

"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...
IMM wrote:

snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2
emitted is
neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate
fossil
fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff.
This
is nothing to the total size of the USA.

This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.

It is?

"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...
Nick Brooks wrote:
IMM wrote:

snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2
emitted is
neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate
fossil
fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff.
This
is nothing to the total size of the USA.

This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.

Is it the most amazing thing since Shadduppaya face was No. 1?

"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...
Nick Brooks wrote:
IMM wrote:

snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2
emitted is
neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate
fossil
fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff.
This
is nothing to the total size of the USA.



This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.

Nick Brooks

And despite the bad form of replying to my own post I've done some
calculations that suggest IMM may be mistaken

according to recent figures
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1.html

Total annual US fossil fuel consumption ammounts to 2.28 x 10^11 (ten to
the power of 11) Kw

105 square miles = 2.71 x 10^8 square meters

which means that each square meter would have to provide 84,000KW (yes
eighty four thousand kilowatts) annually

I don't think so

Article. It says 11,000 squ miles. That is approx 105 miles x 105 miles.

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

IMM wrote:
"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...

IMM wrote:


snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2

emitted is

neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate

fossil

fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff.

This

is nothing to the total size of the USA.

This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.


It is?



It would be if there was a shred of evidence to suggest that it wasn't
complete and utter ********

Nick Brooks

IMM wrote:
"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...

Nick Brooks wrote:

IMM wrote:


snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2
emitted is
neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate
fossil
fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff.
This
is nothing to the total size of the USA.



This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.

Nick Brooks

And despite the bad form of replying to my own post I've done some
calculations that suggest IMM may be mistaken

according to recent figures
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1.html

Total annual US fossil fuel consumption ammounts to 2.28 x 10^11 (ten to
the power of 11) Kw

105 square miles = 2.71 x 10^8 square meters

which means that each square meter would have to provide 84,000KW (yes
eighty four thousand kilowatts) annually

I don't think so


Article. It says 11,000 squ miles. That is approx 105 miles x 105 miles.

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html




Yes but you said 105 square miles which is not the same at all

Nick Brooks

IMM wrote:
"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...

Nick Brooks wrote:

IMM wrote:


snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2
emitted is
neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate
fossil
fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff.
This
is nothing to the total size of the USA.



This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.

Nick Brooks

And despite the bad form of replying to my own post I've done some
calculations that suggest IMM may be mistaken

according to recent figures
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1.html

Total annual US fossil fuel consumption ammounts to 2.28 x 10^11 (ten to
the power of 11) Kw

105 square miles = 2.71 x 10^8 square meters

which means that each square meter would have to provide 84,000KW (yes
eighty four thousand kilowatts) annually

I don't think so


Article. It says 11,000 squ miles. That is approx 105 miles x 105 miles.

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html



AND this article suggest replacing all "petroleum transportation fuels"
NOT to " totally eliminate fossil fuels" as you suggested.

Nick Brooks

"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...
IMM wrote:
"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...

Nick Brooks wrote:

IMM wrote:

snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2
emitted is
neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate
fossil
fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff.
This
is nothing to the total size of the USA.

This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.

Nick Brooks

And despite the bad form of replying to my own post I've done some
calculations that suggest IMM may be mistaken

according to recent figures
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1.html

Total annual US fossil fuel consumption ammounts to 2.28 x 10^11 (ten to
the power of 11) Kw

105 square miles = 2.71 x 10^8 square meters

which means that each square meter would have to provide 84,000KW (yes
eighty four thousand kilowatts) annually

I don't think so

Article. It says 11,000 squ miles. That is approx 105 miles x 105
miles.

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

Yes but you said 105 square miles which is not the same at all

OK 105 miles square then. The point is that 105x105 miles of the USA is
nothing at all. and if it is split all over the country then it will not be
noticed.

"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...
IMM wrote:
"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...

Nick Brooks wrote:

IMM wrote:


snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2
emitted is
neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate
fossil
fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff.
This
is nothing to the total size of the USA.



This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.

Nick Brooks

And despite the bad form of replying to my own post I've done some
calculations that suggest IMM may be mistaken

according to recent figures
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/energy/stats_ctry/Stat1.html

Total annual US fossil fuel consumption ammounts to 2.28 x 10^11 (ten to
the power of 11) Kw

105 square miles = 2.71 x 10^8 square meters

which means that each square meter would have to provide 84,000KW (yes
eighty four thousand kilowatts) annually

I don't think so


Article. It says 11,000 squ miles. That is approx 105 miles x 105
miles.

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

AND this article suggest replacing all "petroleum transportation fuels"
NOT to " totally eliminate fossil fuels" as you suggested.

That was my point, as I responded to a fuel transportation point.

"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...
IMM wrote:
"Nick Brooks" wrote in message
...

IMM wrote:


snip
Biofuel is infinitely superior to fossil in emissions and any CO2

emitted is

neutralised by the growing process. For the USA to totally eliminate

fossil

fuels, only 105 square miles of land is required to grow this stuff.

This

is nothing to the total size of the USA.

This is the most astonishing 'fact' I've ever heard.

It is?

It would be if there was a shred of evidence to suggest that it wasn't
complete and utter ********

But there is no shred of evidence to suggest that. So this is not the most
amazing thing since Shadduppaya face was No. 1.