Tie Rods: very important parts of your car.

Apparently my big white hippie van's wheel almost fell off. Before we complain about the van, let's just tell the fun story of what it feels like when your wheel is about to fall off. I was driving down the road when I noticed the car was shaking. Not badly, but a very noticeable steering wheel shake. I slow down and pull over just to make sure all the wheels are alright. They look fine, so I get back in and as I'm getting back up to speed, I notice that the car pulls very hard to the left every time the wheel goes around. By 35-40 mph the whole car is shaking, and making me very nervous, and as I get up to 65-75 it actually gets a little better, just because I can't feel the individual shakes anymore--so only the steering wheel is shaking . . . after a few conversations with my dad, we decide to tow the car to the nearest mechanic and get it looked at. Turns out a bolt on a tie rod was loose and about to come out, which I believe means cya l8r wheel!

Fun, eh? Now back to the hippie van. Yes, that's right, I drive a big white hippie van. "But Kendall," you must say, "why do you drive a big white hippie van? It's so bad for the environment, and bad for your badass reputation!" Yes, I know all of these things. The fact is that it's still cheaper to pay an extra 100$ a month on gas than it is to pay a car payment (old car--all paid off) and insurance (which my parents have so lovingly taken care of, because it turns out paying for insurance for 5 people isn't that much more expensive than paying for insurance for 4 people.). Awful, right? Cheaper for me ... but not cheaper for the environment. Who will pay the cost in the end?? (cue ominous music!)

Anyway, I decided to pay off my carbon debt by giving this tid bit of advice. (If you already know this, then I'm screwed! ) Did you know you can recycle those plastic starbucks cups? They are plastic number 1--better known in the polymers world as polyethylene terephthalate (PETE), or the plastic that every bottled, water, coke, moutain dew, etc. is made with. In fact, most clear plastic solo-type cups are made with this stuff. The sad part is that the classic red solo party cup is actually made of polystyrene, which, if you've been reading, you know we can't recycle in this country. If you use the clear plastic cups (and surely they make a tinted version), you can just throw them in the recycling bin when you're done. Which is what I'll do this weekend.

By the way, San Diego was awesome. You should all visit sometime.

Don't clean your recycling!

I was reading this blog (sorry guys that blog is kind of aimed at women, but this post is estrogen free!), and I decided that's a really good topic, because I love recycling and it sort of goes along with the polymer theme. Plus now I can explain something I mentioned I would say before, that is, why some environmentalists are to blame for the fact that we can't recycle styrofoam in this country! (I'm excited, because I know you really wanted to hear that story!) Well, if you read the blog I linked to, she's right, and so is ideal bite--you do not have to wash out your bottles and cans before recycling.

In fact, you don't even have to peel the labels off of the bottles/cans/whatever. I really have know idea why your 4th grade school teacher decided it was important to teach you to wash/unpeel everything! It seems like a great big deterrent to me! We're trying to encourage recycling, not make it so difficult no one will participate. Plus, it's kind of a stupid idea if you think about it. If every recycling plant were set up to only take nice clean, peel-free bottles and cans, one bad bottle in the mix could majorly mess up the whole process!

So here's how it works: You take your stuff to a collection center run by folks who probably don't know how the actual plant is run, but that's ok (they mean well, just don't ask them questions about how it all works, or you may get the crazy-plastics-girl stare). They take everything, and remove caps and such, because the caps are made out of stuff that's generally not recycled. Then they send them off to the plant where everything is shredded. So if there was a label on your can/bottle, it is now labelless. Then, they wash all the little shreds to make sure there's no left over mountain dew or bush's baked beans stuck to the side of anything, because that would make for a not so polymerized batch of polyethylene terephthalate. Anyway, after they wash everything, they sort it all out to keep the paper wrappers out of the PETE out of the aluminum cans out of the glass bottles. There are many ways of doing this: there's the float/sink method, which is used for some plastics. They can use magnets to make certain types of metal 'jump' into a proper bin. There's even some very high-tech work going on in the area. Some plants even use 'on-the-fly' spectroscopy and other forms of detection to pick alloys out of other alloys hurtling down a conveyor belt, while using precise air blowers to blow the scraps into the correct bin.

All in all, recycling is pretty darn cool, and I love it! And now I think I owe you a story about what kind of impact McDonald's has on the recycling industry, and why we can't recycle styrofoam. I should start by givin away my source. I heard this story in a polymer processing class at MIT. David Spencer, who was then CEO of wTe Corporation, was giving a guest lecture, and this is where I received most of my knowledge of the recycling industry. Anyway he told us that away back when, McDonald's food containers were made mostly of styrofoam. Apparently some environmentalists were a little upset that McDonald's was using this awful, awful material, and demanded that they switch to something more environmentally friendly. Mickey D's gave in after a while and switched to a plastic coated paper, which it turns out, is completely non-recyclable, thus, just looks environmentally friendly. "So where did the environmentalists go wrong?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you. What they perhaps didn't know or look into was that all the waste created from many happy American children and families eating at McDonald's all the time, was enough styrofoam to keep many styrofoam recycling plants open and doing well. When the massive fast food company switched to plastic coated paper, all these styrofoam plants pretty much went out of business . . . good job, friends . . .

And as a closing to this veritable smorgasbord of recycling information, I'll leave you with one more anecdote from David Spencer's guest lecture. He told another fun story about hippies . . . I mean . . . He also told another fun story. This one's about hippies and also shorter. Back in the 60s, we were discovering that the chlorine in PVC is not so good for the environment, so naturally the hippies started protesting that as well. Until, he says, they were informed that their 'vinyl' records were actually made with PVC . . . there were no more protests after that.

Happy Recycling!

The Impending Polymer Post

In an earlier post, I started going off on a tangent and talking about my hobby of trying to determine which polymer something is made of. I deleted it from that post, because my goal in this blog is to be slightly entertaining and also to improve my writing skills . . . you can attest to how that goes. Anyway, here is that tangent:

It's actually not that hard to figure out which polymer you've got, and it's super easy on the 'recyclable' types, because you can check if you're right! There's a little recycle symbol on the bottom, and it'll have a number in the middle that will tell you exactly what you're working with. Sometimes it even has an abbreviation of the polymer name. After guessing a few times on those, you can get pretty good at it. As for the non-recyclable types, I pretty much just guess.

It also helps to know what a few polymers tend to look and feel like and what a few companies tend to use. For instance, Rubbermaid uses polyurethane and polyethylene. Plus you could probably make a good guess from this list of fairly common polymers that you've probably seen at some point: polyvinyl chloride (PVC), ABS, Lexan polycarbonate resin (the nalgene polymer--the bottle part, not the strap), acrylic, epoxy, polyester, nylon, as well as all the 'recyclable' polymers on the list--polypropylene, high density, low density, and regular polyethylene, polystyrene, and polyethylene terephthalate--check that one out. It's a weird name, but I bet you've used that today. Boy oh boy, that was fun, but I'll tell you the story of why it's the environmentalists' faults that we can't recycle Styrofoam in this country later--also probably why I use quotes when I say 'recyclable.'

Anyway, the reason I decided to write the polymer post is that I continued trying to fix my nalgene today. I had already cut the broken part off, and recut the strap further down to fit it on the notch. It was a pretty soft material, so this was not hard.
I decided to try to make it stronger, though I was pretty sure that was a lost cause. When you make metals stronger, you heat them up so the atoms align in their crystalline structure, and then you quench the metal so the atoms stay where they are when the metal comes back to room temperature. Polymers don't really work like this. They either can be made crystalline, or they can't, and the more complicated they are, the less chance you have of having a material that will crystallize. Anyway, I was fairly certain I was not going to get the polymer above the crystallization temperature or the melting temperature safely in my kitchen, and I was even more certain that this was not going to make it stronger in any way, so really I was just playing around. I stuck it in boiling water, and quenched it, and guess what? It didn't work! I boiled it again, and simply worked the plastic together so it might stay together more. I had stretched it out a bit when I forced in onto the little nubbin on the top of the cap. That seems to have actually helped with the strength some, because now it feels slightly stronger than before, but I really have no way of measuring that.I suppose it's always good to know that if you have something made of polymer, some types become workable around 100 C. They don't melt at 100 C, so you can't mend cracks or holes, but you can reshape them sometimes. A butane lighter can be hot enough to actually melt the polymer, but it would be difficult to use unless it was used on fibers (eg. nylon and polyester). Boiling , of course, is only useful if you ever run into a problem where you'd need to reshape something. If anything melts in your attic over the summer, chances are spectacular that it'll shape right up if you stick it in boiling water and reshape it.

That's my polymer post! Hope you enjoyed it!