Hey dec-fairstreet, would you be interested in someone that could be part-time (say 20-ish hours a week). I know node, TS, and AWS very well. Not much react, but I do some Angular and have done a lot of RDMS but not postgres specifically
I have been searching for something similar. It seems like in the 90s up to the 2010s-ish there were some great books on the subject (code complete, pragmatic programmer, clean code, etc.). But I have yet to find a book of similar caliber that is a modern version of those books. Would love to see what others are reading along these line, books or other wise.
This is actually the "best" answer for our plastics problem. There was an NPR/Planet Money podcast on it recently here: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land and there are plenty of other sources that all agree on this premise. I have worked in waste management a few years ago and recycling is not the long-term solution.
> The utility of oil-based fuels is the energy density in combustion. Burning plastic doesn't come close to the same exchange.
The energy density of plastic (by weight, not volume) is virtually identical to that of oil.
Yes, the machine used to burn oil vs plastic looks different, but coal plants can burn plastic without much modification - and they would be much much cleaner than coal when they do so.
> The energy density of plastic (by weight, not volume) is virtually identical to that of oil.
Oil-based unleaded fuel is not oil. You probably could run trains on plastic. That's if you didn't mind hot plastic raining down around the tracks as the coal dust and soot did when we used it for trains.
We don’t burn oil though. We burn natural gas, in highly-efficient turbines. Burning oil and coal is obsolete technology that we are trying to phase out.
Even more to the point: we can avoid digging coal from the ground, which burns even dirtier than plastics trash.
And even in the lofty goal end state of zero fossils, if it's not a complete collapse back to medieval tech (and population numbers), we would likely end up with biomass based plastics serving as packaging and the like at the upper end of that carbon's energy slope, before utilizing the remaining bound energy in an incinerator.
Biodegradable properties of grown plastics are only a last line of defense against pollution when collection has failed.
You do have significant differences between noxious fumes and clean burning between burning plastic vs burning fossil fuels. The energy captured from the burn is obviously not the same - same reason you can't just set fire to a "bowl" of plastic.
Not really. The bigger problem at the moment is that the market for recycled materials has effectively disappeared. No one is buying these commodities right now. Chinese government owned businesses spent a lot of money buying US paper and plastic mills then shut them down so they could bring those industries to mainland China. Then they discovered that it wasn't as good a business as they hoped. Now they have stopped buying our recycled materials so prices have dropped. Some commodities prices have even gone negative, meaning recycling facilities are paying to have materials removed from the warehouse. So even if sorting was free, most materials are either sitting in warehouses or simply going into the landfill. source: I work in the industry.
I work in the industry too. I'm always curious about what other's in this industry do when they're on HN, so if you're able can you share what you do?
As far as me: I'm the lead engineer for the mobile and api products at one of the major software providers for independent waste haulers in the US. My family owns and operates a hauling operation in CA, so I've spent my entire life surrounded by the inner workings of solid waste collection, hauling, and processing.
I'm an software engineer as well. I work for one of the top 3 waste management companies. I've worked on both consumer side web/mobile apps as well as operations side projects, both in hauling and MRF operations.
Oh interesting, we generally don't go to WasteCon due to how focused it is on public sector since we have a better product fit with independent haulers (we do have several municipalities using our software though). Maybe we should be going though - always good to expand our horizons. Feel free to shoot me an email at: my first name at edisoncode.com
It really depends on the region since landfill rates vary wildly. In California: most likely yes since landfilling is relatively expensive, but again depends.
Waste haulers have always had a non-zero expense for recycling even when the processed materials had strong values. This is because the recycling has to be collected, transported, sorted/processed, then shipped again. Depending on the local market, regulations, incentives/subsidies, and distances involved for shipping it can very easily end up that a negative commodity price tips the scales in favor of landfilling.
Also, it's worth noting that some portion of the recycling stream will end up in a landfill regardless of the commodity price because it's contaminated (or just not a recyclable material) which has an impact on the overall cost per ton of recycling. Commodity prices going negative just push this to include more of the stream since it means only the "best" materials are economically viable for further processing and shipping. It's a balancing act that the industry has been doing internally for a long time, but now it's becoming a serious issue since large amounts of the recycling stream need to be landfilled if we don't want to spend a whole lot more than we already do on solid waste.
It can be, but in some cases there are simply no buyers at any price point. And there's no way anyone is going to spend more money building larger warehouse to hold the commodity. So it get stacked until the warehouse is full, then operators have no choice but to put it in the landfill.
When I left a previous employer, their legal department sent me a certified letter sternly stating that any "thought" or "idea" I had during my employment was their property.
