In just the US, it’s estimated that 2.5 million tons of electronic waste is discarded. E-waste refers to your phone, your laptop, or anything that you put batteries into that you’ve thrown out. Any kind of waste or trash buildup is a tragedy, but e-waste is a particular problem due to the materials it puts out into the ecosystem. There is the common problem of the plastic, non-biodegradable casings, but additionally circuit boards need precious metals like gold, copper, and silver to work. None of this is very friendly waste to your local woodland animals. This Science Friday podcast talks briefly about this global concern. Throwing away your phone not only puts harsh metals into the environment, but it also compounds the problem where instead of recycling those metals, we're forced to mine more from the earth. While this New York Times article only addresses gold mining, the implications are clear. The mining processes are extremely damaging to the area (they have to use cyanide to extract the gold from the rock!), and wealthier nations don’t want to have to deal with the high costs of regulating the mining safely. The demand is so high, however, that the operations are just being pushed over to less wealthy nations, where dumping of toxic leftovers into rivers and oceans goes unchecked. So what is the solution to all of this toxic waste? Recycling is the most obvious option. It’s estimated that less than 10% of phones are recycled right now, so there’s a lot of potential for improvement in this sector. In many instances, places like Best Buy will have a recycling receptacle right on the premises so you can dump your old electronics the same day you pick up a replacement! The EPA also has a website for finding locations near you to recycle e-waste. For the adventurous that want to recycle on their own, here’s a YouTube video to guide you in scavenging gold from those old cell phones! Can there be another solution? Of course! There’s never just one. We can think about engineering products that are less harmful to the environment so that we don’t have to rely on only recycling. There are already quite a few thinkers working on biodegradable plastics, which would take care of the cases for electronics. But what about the electronic parts themselves? Is there a way to get around using toxic precious metals? Maybe there's a more biologically-friendly way to design circuit boards. To start, I can think of a few superheroes who have mastered the art of organic energy generation: These characters generate the energy from their own bodies, but there are other instances of heroes being able to manipulate and conduct energy from other sources, like natural lightning: And as a quick physics lesson (a nod again to The Physics of Superheroes) Magneto can also generate an electric field if he starts running. But what can we do to start exploring bioelectrogenesis? One example closer to our world is fishes like the electric eel, and other gymnotiformes. All of these freshwater fishes are capable of producing electric fields. Most of them use it for the purpose of electrolocation to detect biological energy signals and find prey in dark, muddy waters. The electric eel is the only one of these knifefishes known to be capable of producing voltages strong enough to attack. Other animals are capable of using passive electrolocation, like sharks and bony fishes that have lateral lines, and monotremes (platypuses and echidnas) have electroreceptors in their snouts. This ability has generally only evolved in fish and amphibians because electricity is conducted better in water than it is in air, so terrestrial animals wouldn’t get much use out of electroreception. So my proposed solution is that we look at the principles these fish are using and start working on bioelectrogenesis. Maybe in the future our circuit boards can be a little more biodegradable, or even repair themselves!
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7/8/2020 06:16:33 am
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Alanna DurkinExploring the realm of biologically inspired design one superhero example at a time, with some other natural sciences mixed in. Archives
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