I've been told black plastic doesnt get recycled at the recycling plants because the sorting system doesn't work on black plastic.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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Plastic that’s got a lot of color (especially black) is very, very hard to recycle. Getting the color out so you can make like-new, colorless plastic makes the economics pretty much impossible.
Should recycled plastic that isn’t colorless be accepted? Yep. But basically every manufacturer that uses recycled plastic only accepts colorless stuff. Even if they’re going to turn around and dump a bunch of pigment and dye into it! (Or especially if they’re going to do that. They have specific color targets.)
So, for now, if you buy something that’s made from recycled plastic but isn’t clear and colorless, that plastic is now outside of the recycle-able ecosystem. It’s a bummer.
But there are ways to get around that coming online. One is to turn the plastic polymers back into monomers (the building block molecules). It’s sometimes easier to separate out the pigments and dyes once you have a chemical soup of monomers instead of a block of plastic. Then you take the purified monomers and repolymerize them. Bam, you have recycled plastic that’s nearly indistinguishable from new.
I worked on a chemical recycling / depolymerization project for a couple of years. That tech is currently being scaled up into a big plant that’ll actually churn out like-new plastic from really crappy input material. Pretty exciting stuff. (As long as the business and engineering guys running the project now don’t ruin it.)
That sorting system is clearly racist.
actually, if we're painting them black, isn't that just blackface now?
IMO we need to stop humanizing robots. There is no reason for a robot to be human in form. Form should match function. Furthermore, a humanoid robots elicit feelings from people that are not helpful or healthy. There are people who might advise a robot because it isn't an actual person, it doesn't mean that their abuse is less mentally ill. They should be viewed as a machine and treated as such, no better than a car.
We designed our world around ourselves
It is only logical the human shape is the most efficient and versatile design that fits it
It is only logical the human shape is the most efficient and versatile design that fits it
Don't know about that - cats seem to clamber around this neighborhood far more efficiently than I ever could.
Sounds easier to make a human shaped robot than to make something else than can climb stairs as well as do everything else needed efficiently.
Maybe a different shape would be fine if they never needed to climb stairs or go up and down curbs, like rolling around everywhere, which we already see in some restaurants with the little programmable serving robots.
Humans are bipedal for a reason, it’s one of the most versatile and efficient forms of mobility. Plus the world is designed for humans, making an humanoid robot allows them to interact with things made for humans more easily.
And humans can grow an attachment to and anthropomorphize plenty of non-humanoid objects. So I think it’s fine that it’s human shaped.
You ever play QWOP?
I disagree. Robots could still be designed to work and fit in human spaces but be much more versatile with more limbs. Like they could have 4 legs that are the same size as 2 human legs (think 2 human legs split right down the center). Robots don't need muscle mass in order to carry their weight. You can fit way more in a smaller space with pneumatics. You could have arms that split apart into more arms when needed. Why only 5 fingers per hand? Why only 1 thumb per hand? Why only eyes/cameras on the head? They should have eyes/cameras everywhere. Every place you can put them. Bipedal is good enough for us because it's what we have. When you get to design something from the ground up, make it harder, better, faster, stronger.
I've made this exact argument for years.
Robots could easily be constructed to work in a human designed world, only much better.
I mean the world is usually (and should be) designed for people in wheelchairs, too. The only thing that comes to mind that humans frequently interface with, which benefits from human bipedalism, is stairs. Stairs aren't something that's impossible to design around with a wheeled vehicle, either, and I don't think the efficiency tradeoff is one that turns out in favor of legs, at least for robots.
The only thing I can really conceive of as being a use case for a humanoid robot is if you decided to deploy it in a totally unbuilt environment with little infrastructure, which is pretty counterintuitive considering the energy density of current battery technology. I think that would probably only work as an idea if you had like, a nuclear battery, for a human scale robot, and we have tank treads for everything else. I think maybe the prevalence of legs in robotics either stems from the fact that people think it's cool, which is important for funding, it stems from some amount of funding coming from military or pseudo-military applications like "disaster relief" where an ability to operate in diverse environments is seen as a plus, and it stems from people banking on denser and denser battery technology and maybe lighter weights material science.
I think it also stems from a kind of all-encompassing ideal to create a totally self-sufficient worker-slave that is both unconscious but is also totally adaptable to the environment and can operate with minimal inputs, compared to a person. There's like, some conception that you can make a robot which can act in an environment in the same basic way as a person, but then you also can't make any robots that are designed for any specialized tasks, and which might do those specialized tasks in a much, much more efficient way than a humanoid robot would be able to do them. Also somehow this ability to do tasks similar to how a person might do them would really be like, something that you have to confine to a human sized body, rather than just using it to sort of further automate the managerial class. There's some idea that this is more efficient to scale, rather than being more efficient at scale, or that somehow once you make a humanoid robot you will have cracked the code somehow, and everything will just be post-scarcity, because you can make the robots mine the lithium to make more robots.
I don't think I have to tell you that all of these are kind of naive, as viewpoints, or, are intrinsically viewpoints that kind of discount the amount of interpretive labor that has to be performed by people in order for the system to work, the variety of said labor as it exists, or the amount of effort involved that you would really have to do in order to automate that away. I think, to put it more bluntly, if you tasked a robot with automating a kind of, big, general batch of tasks like humans might perform, it would probably make a specialized set of robots which can complete all the tasks as suited to the task each robot has to do, rather than creating a big general human shaped robot to do them all.
So I think it’s fine that it’s human shaped.
yeh, looks way better than those four legged things
I don't see a lot of white painted robots around. I actually don't see a lot of painted robots around in the first place
Or humanoid robots period
Sure, there is likely some racism involved, but it also has absolutely nothing to do with white being the cheapest type of ABS and PLA plastics. Greed trumps racism. And that was the most unintentionally descriptive sentence I have ever said about MAGA-ism.
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Anyone remember the movie Ice Pirates? There’s a whole scene in there about the color of the robot.
Only you, RedLetterMedia, and everyone who watched that episode.
I saw it in the theater as a kid. Love that crazy movie.
"Why did you make it black?"
"Cause I wanted it to be perfect."
Color: exists Newspapers: Does this color imply.. racism??
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