With or without graphene, if you're drilling holes into concrete without a mask, you're gonna have a bad time. Rock dust, mineral dust, even wood dust from a saw are all carcinogens when inhaled.
I imagine the danger isn't significantly increased unless the graphene is layered thickly enough that the concrete doesn't bond all the way through it. Either you're worried about concrete dust, or you are worried about graphene dust. Concrete dust with bonded bits of graphene are going to be the same physical size as concrete, so I wouldn't expect it to be significantly more dangerous combined.
That was my thought too. There's some hard-to-compost stuff ... but I think those are still more valuable as biochar than graphene, from an ecological perspective.
The flip side is, I wonder if this could be scaled down to a home device for processing plastics. It doesn't even have to produce graphene.
Where do you live that compost is less available than graphene? I'd love to move there, it's a wonder material that seems close to magic and I'd love to use it for my tech products. Where I live, there are absolutely zero risks whatsoever of running out of compost even if we converted all disposed food to graphene - but were very much lacking graphene, especially of the cheap and large scale variety.
They produce graphene from burning stuff. Where do you live where most things that burn don't contain carbon?
Turn things to graphene that otherwise would just be garbage.
You have enough compost? Send it to countries where deserts destroy farmland.
there is even a similar DIY, only using microwave generated flash, on producing a [very small] artificial diamond from graphite by what basically is CVD method https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Make-a-Synthetic-Diamon... which most probably would work for any source of carbon (the people who don't like the low tech look of it may google for respected scientific labs doing similar :)
I got mixed feelings about this. Food waste is valuable as compost and can be put back into the carbon cycle, and I think that is far more valuable than graphene in terms of ecology, rather than the market.
Plastic, on the other hand, just sits there and we have not been able to put it back into the carbon cycle. Turning them into an advanced material like graphene is great.
CO2 is ecologically compatible. That's basically what long chain polymers reduce to if burned efficiently. And you can get energy out of them by burning them.
Yes that’s the point. gasification turns them into functional fuel’s. combusting them produces much “cleaner” gases than what burning plastic directly would produce.
Hmm not so straightforward. it’s very necessary for all forums of plant life. its just a matter of to much in the atmosphere is not a good thing.
The current climate issue movement fails to address the ecological problems at hand. It’s all about co2 levels and not about healthy ecosystems and integrating back into nature. Plastic waste is really fucking up out planet.
Well I made the comment to point out, with the climate change discussion and all, that the big point is we don't want this stuff entering the carbon cycle. If it's good for this stuff to enter the carbon cycle, then climate change due to CO2 isn't a problem, burn it. If it is a problem, then it should be sequestered from the carbon cycle, like the stuff that came from the ground was a billion years ago, and some complex way of basically burning it is counterproductive.
Food waste ending up in the landfill is bad, produces large amounts of methane. I imagine there will always be streams of food waste that need to be diverted out of the landfill. In CA you're no longer allowed to throw food waste in the trash bin, it must be composted. I don't think that option is available everywhere. Having a variety of options should help divert food from ending up in a landfill.
> In CA you're no longer allowed to throw food waste in the trash bin, it must be composted
How strictly is that enforced? And is it applied without exceptions? For example I compost but if I have something oily I'm going to compost it because oily soil isn't great.
It's probably just San Francisco. I have heard of something like that at the municipal level. I don't remember something like that when I visited family in Sacramento a couple months ago.
Seattle has something like that too, when I lived there seven years ago. We were provided bins for composting, and compost bins were in every resturant I went to.
Ah. So organisms such as oyster mushrooms can eat oil in contaminated soil and bring it back into something that plants can grow on.
It also depends on how you are composting. The main problem with composting oily food is that the oil goes rancid. There are solutions for that.
Black Soldier Flies Larvae can eat that stuff, and are symbiotic to human activity. (They stay in one place, drive out the other species of flies, and don't go after humans). If you have a red earthworm composting bin, you'd feed the BSFL stuff that you don't want to feed the worms. (You'd feed the worms the best stuff and give the rest to the BSFL).
Industrial composters will just throw them all in big piles and they will eventually compost. Some might implement ideas from Paul Stamets and cultivate fungi on the heaps to help it break down faster.
The key is onsite composting and having it go back to onsite gardens. Failing that, a neighborhood composting which goes back to neighborhood gardens. The idea is to close the carbon cycle to the local area. This has the additional benefit of being able to grow food that are bred to be nutritious rather than bred to be transportable, mitigating overharvesting (when producers and consumers are separated by enough distance).
Usually though, what we have in the US is that foodwaste goes to landfills (bad), and then lawns are grown with fertilizers (instead of compost). That's a much larger carbon cycle that ends up depleting the land in multiple ways. Let's not even get to how wasteful we get with water management -- pumping water, purifying them to drinking water standards, and then watering lawns with them.
I’m not sure I understand why we would want to put things back into the carbon cycle? Isn’t the problem that we have to much gaseous carbon out there at the moment? Wouldn’t it be better to sequester the excess carbon in some way?
Most of what you hear about sequestering carbon are too simplistic of strategies and models, and usually do not take into the account the bio-availability of carbon.
Carbon that is eaten and used by plants, sequestered in soil are bio-available in the ecosystem, and if designed well, then there can be many kinds of yields useful for human. Healthy soil -- not dirt! -- with living organisms holding it, has a dramatic effect on the microclimate of the area, and helps regulate the microclimate across the solar cycle.
When you have bare dirt, and no plants or anything living there, then the area gains more temperature variability.
Because of the way we farm in the modern world, we leave a lot of bare dirt around. Thermal satallites show a rise in temperature every year during the planting and harvesting seasons. The idea of reducing carbon emissions from industrial processes and cars will not reduce the climate extremes we are seeing. Having better land management, tightening up carbon and water cycles in microclimates helps a lot more, and have many beneficial side-effects (such as reducing weath inequality gaps, having stronger more cohesive communities)
But an example of what I am talking about. The film is focused more on better water management, but it's integrated with bringing fertility back to a wasteland. The water harvesting strutures discussed in the video are dug in a way that also accumulates organic matter so that topsoil can rebuild on what is otherwise bedrock. https://youtu.be/KtHuIlfyJao
"Food waste is valuable as compost and can be put back into the carbon cycle, and I think that is far more valuable than graphene in terms of ecology, rather than the market."
This was my first thought. I agree. The minerals and nutrients are much more valuable as fertilizer. I think we rely too heavily on synthetic fertilizer and fail to realize how much arable land we throw away each year (by not reintroducing the waste to the lands).
If graphene is cheap by either source, there's a net benefit regardless. When tech adds flexibility, we converge on more efficient uses overall because we don't have to push them through a bottleneck. And graphene manufacturing is believed to reduce our footprint in other areas by being "stronger and lighter" per unit: less used, less transported, less wasted.
And if waste food becomes a major resource, that acts as a direct encouragement to subsidize food overproduction, which is not really a bad thing(nobody wants their nation to starve in a bad season).
We definitely do not want to put plastic back into the carbon cycle. It was created from oil that was outside the carbon cycle for millions of years, bringing that back into the carbon cycle created the climate change situation we are in. Bringing more of that back into the carbon cycle via plastic just makes things worse. We want existing plastic (and carbon in the air etc) taken permanently out of the carbon cycle somehow.
I definitely want to put the plastic into the carbon cycle, it is just that the carbon cycle I have in mind is not the same as the carbon cycle people are used to thinking.
There's a carbon cycle of plants -> oil -> plastics -> burn in air -> plants -> oil ... And that cycle takes a long time.
But the carbon cycle I am thinking of is one that makes the carbon in the plastics bio-available to plants directly. That means greater fertility, greater food abundance, food sovereignty, better land management.
Trying to stuff the carbon from plastics back into rock does not give us greater fertility, food abundance or food sovereignty. If anything, it will increase the wealth inequality gap, and makes it harder to feed everyone.
We're not quite there yet. The key is being able to safely composting plastics, and that means finding or breeding microorganisms that are capable of eating it. What we would have to give up are the properties of plastic that our modern society is addicted to ... something that _doesn't_ biodegrade, durable and cheap enough to be used ubiquitously.
That is a good point, there are a lot of parallels between our current plastic situation and the world before the invention of lignin/cellulose breakdown mechanisms by fungi.
However, I still think that in the short term, stopping the oil/gas/plastic carbon cycle and finding ways to reverse it, to reduce climate change is much more important for the planet and humanity.
In addition, we need to think about stabilising the human population (encouraging birth control etc) both for climate change and ecological/species survival reasons.
Once we have solved/stablised/reversed Earth's ecological problems then maybe we can think about integrating plastics back into the shorter carbon cycle safely.
There are a few ways that it might not be "graphene".
First, it probably isn't monolayer, but rather variable layer numbers, so practically speaking... it's probably graphite.
Second, there is likely to be a lot of defects. So you don't get the full strength that you would find with single crystal exfoliated or epitaxially grown graphene.
Still, I would imagine that a method like this could be useful, particularly if you were building a colony off-world. You don't need high-quality graphene for making composites for construction.
It was on a graphene subreddit long ago (r/graphene or r/graphene_DIY .. not sure). The guy said something like "the methodology doesn't measure or assess the graphene type produced". I can't find who or what thread it was sorry.
He didn't explain in details saying telling more would be intellectual property breach and that a lot of companies are searching for flash joule like techniques and if they were working they'd be in use yesterday.
Spent my PhD on this and can confirm. Tour's brilliant. Part of his brilliance is in leveraging hot topics to secure funding, increase his status as an expert, and ultimately give young minds the chance to push the field of carbon study forward.
Academics have to play the game.
It is not technically graphene due to the multicrysal + variable layer formation. You can search my user name in google scholar to see my publications.
Is "graphene" vaporware? I've been hearing it hyped up for over ten years but it isn't actually a proper usable technology yet, as far as I can tell. Just endless press releases about making it in increasingly unlikely ways in the lab.
Yes. I've tried to use it several times in designs and it doesn't really have many practical uses. Companies are trying to use it in "head spreader" films, pads , etc. The issue is that it's only one atom thick, it has amazing thermal conductivity through the film, but very low cross section of material to do the thermal transfer because it's so thin. It has thermal conductivity of an order of magnitude less in Z, so stacking it doesn't buy anything. It has some limited use in some very specific applications, but it's not terribly useful.
Going by the numbers in the article: $200,000/ton, 2.2lbs/day production in two years; this yields $200/day. Fine for a lab, perhaps not so for a financial concern.
> Tour hopes to produce a kilogram (2.2 pounds) a day of flash graphene within two years, starting with a project recently funded by the Department of Energy to convert U.S.-sourced coal. “This could provide an outlet for coal in large scale by converting it inexpensively into a much-higher-value building material,” he said.
That's where a lab scientists keeps both feet in the ground, makes sensible estimate, and fears missing them.
Whereas an Elon-type would already have promissed a ton per seconds by the end of the year - and maybe the simple fact of stupidly overcommiting would actually make things a _bit_ faster.
Good luck to them anyway, seems like a cool process.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 30.6 ms ] threadI wonder if the walls are made of graphene reinforced concrete, if I drill some holes, how dangerous is it?
I imagine the danger isn't significantly increased unless the graphene is layered thickly enough that the concrete doesn't bond all the way through it. Either you're worried about concrete dust, or you are worried about graphene dust. Concrete dust with bonded bits of graphene are going to be the same physical size as concrete, so I wouldn't expect it to be significantly more dangerous combined.
The flip side is, I wonder if this could be scaled down to a home device for processing plastics. It doesn't even have to produce graphene.
You have enough compost? Send it to countries where deserts destroy farmland.
Ben from NightHawkInLight has a good "DIY" video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Et8FEbCuCs
Plastic, on the other hand, just sits there and we have not been able to put it back into the carbon cycle. Turning them into an advanced material like graphene is great.
In theory it’s a great way to reduce this non ecological material into fuel, in return into something that is ecologically compatible.
plastic is just fuckd
Yes, but it just kills the climate.
The current climate issue movement fails to address the ecological problems at hand. It’s all about co2 levels and not about healthy ecosystems and integrating back into nature. Plastic waste is really fucking up out planet.
How strictly is that enforced? And is it applied without exceptions? For example I compost but if I have something oily I'm going to compost it because oily soil isn't great.
Anecdotally, I’m a CA homeowner and this is the first I’ve heard of it.
Seattle has something like that too, when I lived there seven years ago. We were provided bins for composting, and compost bins were in every resturant I went to.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/new-california-compost-law...
It also depends on how you are composting. The main problem with composting oily food is that the oil goes rancid. There are solutions for that.
Black Soldier Flies Larvae can eat that stuff, and are symbiotic to human activity. (They stay in one place, drive out the other species of flies, and don't go after humans). If you have a red earthworm composting bin, you'd feed the BSFL stuff that you don't want to feed the worms. (You'd feed the worms the best stuff and give the rest to the BSFL).
Industrial composters will just throw them all in big piles and they will eventually compost. Some might implement ideas from Paul Stamets and cultivate fungi on the heaps to help it break down faster.
Usually though, what we have in the US is that foodwaste goes to landfills (bad), and then lawns are grown with fertilizers (instead of compost). That's a much larger carbon cycle that ends up depleting the land in multiple ways. Let's not even get to how wasteful we get with water management -- pumping water, purifying them to drinking water standards, and then watering lawns with them.
Carbon that is eaten and used by plants, sequestered in soil are bio-available in the ecosystem, and if designed well, then there can be many kinds of yields useful for human. Healthy soil -- not dirt! -- with living organisms holding it, has a dramatic effect on the microclimate of the area, and helps regulate the microclimate across the solar cycle.
When you have bare dirt, and no plants or anything living there, then the area gains more temperature variability.
Because of the way we farm in the modern world, we leave a lot of bare dirt around. Thermal satallites show a rise in temperature every year during the planting and harvesting seasons. The idea of reducing carbon emissions from industrial processes and cars will not reduce the climate extremes we are seeing. Having better land management, tightening up carbon and water cycles in microclimates helps a lot more, and have many beneficial side-effects (such as reducing weath inequality gaps, having stronger more cohesive communities)
But an example of what I am talking about. The film is focused more on better water management, but it's integrated with bringing fertility back to a wasteland. The water harvesting strutures discussed in the video are dug in a way that also accumulates organic matter so that topsoil can rebuild on what is otherwise bedrock. https://youtu.be/KtHuIlfyJao
This was my first thought. I agree. The minerals and nutrients are much more valuable as fertilizer. I think we rely too heavily on synthetic fertilizer and fail to realize how much arable land we throw away each year (by not reintroducing the waste to the lands).
And if waste food becomes a major resource, that acts as a direct encouragement to subsidize food overproduction, which is not really a bad thing(nobody wants their nation to starve in a bad season).
There's a carbon cycle of plants -> oil -> plastics -> burn in air -> plants -> oil ... And that cycle takes a long time.
But the carbon cycle I am thinking of is one that makes the carbon in the plastics bio-available to plants directly. That means greater fertility, greater food abundance, food sovereignty, better land management.
Trying to stuff the carbon from plastics back into rock does not give us greater fertility, food abundance or food sovereignty. If anything, it will increase the wealth inequality gap, and makes it harder to feed everyone.
We're not quite there yet. The key is being able to safely composting plastics, and that means finding or breeding microorganisms that are capable of eating it. What we would have to give up are the properties of plastic that our modern society is addicted to ... something that _doesn't_ biodegrade, durable and cheap enough to be used ubiquitously.
However, I still think that in the short term, stopping the oil/gas/plastic carbon cycle and finding ways to reverse it, to reduce climate change is much more important for the planet and humanity.
In addition, we need to think about stabilising the human population (encouraging birth control etc) both for climate change and ecological/species survival reasons.
Once we have solved/stablised/reversed Earth's ecological problems then maybe we can think about integrating plastics back into the shorter carbon cycle safely.
Not trying to snark, I’m genuinely interested in seeing the counter arguments. Thanks
First, it probably isn't monolayer, but rather variable layer numbers, so practically speaking... it's probably graphite.
Second, there is likely to be a lot of defects. So you don't get the full strength that you would find with single crystal exfoliated or epitaxially grown graphene.
Still, I would imagine that a method like this could be useful, particularly if you were building a colony off-world. You don't need high-quality graphene for making composites for construction.
He didn't explain in details saying telling more would be intellectual property breach and that a lot of companies are searching for flash joule like techniques and if they were working they'd be in use yesterday.
It is not technically graphene due to the multicrysal + variable layer formation. You can search my user name in google scholar to see my publications.
do you know any good places to read, or sites to follow about graphene research ?
I was interested in the flash joule thing to play with conductive ink or insulations..
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/masks-early-pulmonar...
Tour hopes to produce a kilogram a day of flash graphene within two years
Ah, scaling problems.
Wasn't the same thing said for asbestos cement?
That's where a lab scientists keeps both feet in the ground, makes sensible estimate, and fears missing them.
Whereas an Elon-type would already have promissed a ton per seconds by the end of the year - and maybe the simple fact of stupidly overcommiting would actually make things a _bit_ faster.
Good luck to them anyway, seems like a cool process.