....in terms of fuel usage; it requires 15kW-h of electricity, or about 55MJ, to refine a kilogram of aluminium. In contrast, gasoline produces about 45mJ/kg, and coal produces about 24MJ/kg. Keep in mind that your power plant is probably fueled with coal due to the expense of other fuels.
What does this mean? Well, given about 30% efficiency in a coal fired power plant, or about 20-25% efficiency in a gasoline engine, you've got to burn about 7kG of coal or gasoline to produce one kG of aluminium.
Convert your steel car to an aluminium Focus now, and you find that the 700kG of aluminium was obtained at the cost of burning about 4900kG--about 1500 gallons of gasoline, or about the amount a Focus would use in driving about 50,000 miles. To actually break even with the standard vehicle in terms of energy use, you've got to go about 150,000 miles.
Then you can consider the opportunity cost of the $50k estimated sticker price--even a 5% return and a long 10 year life for depreciation costs you a cool $7500 annually.
About enough to buy a decent new car every two or three years. Sounds like a very expensive way to save some energy to me.
Oh, and back to that recycling thing; yup, most of the energy saved is due to recycling....you got it, aluminium. Think twice before putting your pop bottles in there. It may not work out after all.
Know Your Lifts: The Romanian Deadlift (RDL)
-
In the Know Your Lifts series, we’ve covered the high-bar back squat, the
low-bar squat, the power jerk and split jerk, and the overhead press. It’s
been...
11 hours ago
11 comments:
"Think twice before putting your pop bottles in there. It may not work out after all."
I'm nearing the point of not caring whether recycling "works" economically -- something is just WRONG about digging stuff out of the ground, expending lots of energy, labor, and money making it into something else, making use of it for a few days between the processing of the product contained in the in container and my opening the container and using the product, and then burying it in the ground, forever, to be useless and ugly. I have a hard time believing God provides resources to be used that way. There's got to be a better way.
IOW the alternative to "putting my pop bottles in the recycling bin" is "burying them in the ground." At least in the recycling bin they could be used for something else rather than become worthless waste. It's cheaper to just keep piling our junk in the ground, yes, but ultimately "better"?
pentamom...why is it useless and ugly when it's buried in the ground?
I'd suggest you check out the econtalk 'recycling' podcast...i'm sure i've mentioned it about a dozen times here, but I've listened to it about as many, and it's great.
Of course, you can keep on just thinking that it's WRONG, but I promise that your idea of what the definition of "economics" is is very lacking...check out some of those podcasts. 2 years ago, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with your sentiments here...now I'm applying to grad school for a masters in economics, because I realize how central it is to virtually everything.
in short, what if it takes more resources to "recycle" aluminum, glass, paper than it does to make new ones?
In that case, you're using up one resource in order to "conserve" another. Is that wise?
As a reductio ad absurdum, what if it took the GDP of Australia to recycle one aluminum can into a reusable form, would that be a good example of stewardship? No, of course not...now, if it took one penny to recycle an aluminum can, and one dollar to dig up the bauxite and separate the aluminum from it using relatively lots of electricity, then it would be foolish to keep using the dug-up bauxite, when the recycling uses less resources.
Of course, the truth is somewhere between those two extremes. How can we figure out which way uses less resources? Because it's cheaper. It's a magical proxy for efficiency.
There is a reality that garbage disposal is heavily subsidized in many areas, and that might change the recycling equation. That said, if you wreck one square foot of land with pop bottle disposal, but three square feet of land by recycling them, you're still behind on the equation.
Shawn, I understand your point, and I'm not sure what to think. That said, before you write me off as ignorant please understand that I'm moving the opposite direction -- I once thought as you do, but now am rethinking it. But that's all I'm doing -- rethinking it.
well...ignorant isn't a pejorative word; stupid is. I'm not calling you stupid...maybe just uninformed.
To me, the issue seems black and white (or as close as is possible without complete information)...but perhaps that's ignorance as well.
As bert said, the prices are admittedly screwed up (we don't charge the 'real' price for garbage disposal, and maybe if we did, people would recycle more...but they'd also illegally dump more, so I don't know how to get those prices right), but I don't know how to do things better than with prices...I'd love to have a better metric, but don't see one that conveys all of the information that prices do...and that's the important thing in this discussion: realizing what exactly is conveyed by prices, and then realizing the incentives that are in play.
Maybe there's a way to get the prices better, and incentivize in the right direction...
"and that's the important thing in this discussion: realizing what exactly is conveyed by prices, and then realizing the incentives that are in play."
Yes, I agree with that. But that's why I asked you not to assume that I'm ignorant -- because I'm considering the same facts you are, and simply have not decided to agree with your conclusions. I believe you didn't mean it to be pejorative, but it was making an assumption about how "informed" I am, without having any possible way of knowing that. All I ask is that I'd like you to stop making assumptions about how much I know -- or keep the assumptions to yourself if you can't do that.
...isn't that the nature of blogs? we don't know much about the other person, so we're having a conversation about an issue...and, thankfully, we're disagreeing a bit w/o calling each other stupid-heads, or worse.
Maybe I'm not quite understanding...what is offending you about what I said? I don't see that I made unreasonable assumptions or demeaning ones, though maybe it came across that way.
Shawn, the point isn't that it's demeaning -- it's that it's inaccurate. I'm not offended, I'm just trying to correct a misconception you have about where I'm coming from.
I don't actually have a problem with you assuming I'm ignorant in the initial instance -- it's insisting that I must be even after I tell you that I am informed on the issues that I object to.
The problem is that if you keep insisting I'm ignorant, you're now telling me that I'm too stupid to know whether I'm ignorant or not. Again, I'm not so much "offended" by this as bemused, as well as troubled by your assumption that someone who comes to different conclusions -- or in this case, merely considers different conclusions -- must be ill-informed. That is neither persuasive nor logical, and won't help you to understand other people's positions very well.
Remember, the conclusion of my first post wasn't, "So recycling is the answer, no matter what the cost."
It was, "There's got to be a better way." I'm not sure what's ignorant about a belief that it's worth finding out whether there's a better answer to these issues than "Oh, well, recycling doesn't work, just bury all our junk in the ground and don't worry about it."
Another reason I question whether the issue can be reduced to economics (despite the fact that I do believe that economics are usually very descriptive of a variety of costs) is that the most economical thing to do would be to throw it all in the streets, like they used to do in the old days. It's only because values that were not as obviously perceived as being economic ones began to take hold, that we decided that that was no longer such a good idea. It's true these other values have economic implications, but I never intended to suggest that anything was entirely divorced from economics, nor do I think that is necessarily inferred from what I wrote.
In short, I think you reacted to what I said more than considering it, and you assumed that "ignorance" could be the only explanation. I'm just asking you to reconsider that.
Post a Comment