Comments on: Waste not want not (Blog Action Day)

By: Lex

Lex — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:21:37 +0000

And just about everything with a jelly-like consistency. There was a Discover article some years ago that gave the full list…it was eye-opening.

By: Brian Angliss

Brian Angliss — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:10:54 +0000

Cow ends up in McDonald’s french fries, for one.

By: Lex

Lex — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:44:14 +0000

I haven’t been to an abattoir (just like that word, not trying to be elitist), but i do know that it all gets used. I don’t recall the names to look for, but cow ends up in a great many products that you’d never expect to see them in.

Now we just need to work on the livestock waste pre-slaughter.

By: Ubertramp

Ubertramp — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:12:38 +0000

Jeff, I come at it from the radiation medicine perspective. Low dose/low dose rate radiation is sometimes used as a model for aging. Radiation causes most of its damage by generating lots of reactive oxygen species. While most of the initial blast gets cleaned up in microseconds, enough of it starts interacting with lipid membranes, proteins, and organelles (like the mitochondria) that ROS homeostasis is probably shifted a bit, allowing a higher “tolerance” of ROS. This, in turn, causes more damage, etc, etc, etc. Mitochondria by themselves kick out a shitload of ROS as part of normal metabolism (making ATP). Immune cells (like macrphages and neutrophils) make a shitload of ROS when killing bacteria and cleaning up dead/dying cells. One theory is that messing up that normal homeostasis is probably a large part of the aging process.

But having said all that, I was really just pushing Brian’s buttons.

By: jeff watson

jeff watson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:59:00 +0000

lex,

Have you ever been to a slaughterhouse? As the old saying goes, “The use everything but the moo.”

Jeff

By: Lex

Lex — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:32:28 +0000

As depressing as the situation can be, i get pretty excited about elegant solutions when i see them. I don’t really like pork, but i’d go out of my way to eat it in Korea because i loved their solution to feeding the pigs and reducing household waste at the same time.

It’s been called “Natural Capitalism” and a few other things. I’d like to see us move towards better, more integrated design of both products and manufacturing with a concerted effort to design wastes as inputs for other processes.

By: jeff watson

jeff watson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:22:53 +0000

Ubertramp, I always was taught that since all chemical reactions are incomplete, that gives significant contribution to the aging process, far more than any radical….but then again, what do I know.

By: Ubertramp

Ubertramp — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:15:47 +0000

Of course, hydrogen peroxide and other oxygen radicals are why we age. So, I guess you could argue that we’re saving our environment by killing ourselves faster.

By: Brian Angliss

Brian Angliss — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:26:15 +0000

Thanks for this, Lex. In the immortal words of George Carlin: “The planet will be fine. The people are fucked.”

There has been a lot of research in the last decade or so into green chemistry techniques specifically to get away from the nasty solvents and other chemicals that are produced by our existing industrial processes. Green chemistry tries to use water and hydrogen peroxide and other similar naturally-occurring substances to do the same things that you used to need acetone (or worse) to do. And lots of catalysts to reduce the energy requirements for reactions or even enable self-assembly.

Fascinating stuff. I’d say we’re moving in the right direction, but we’ve got a ways to go yet.

By: jeff watson

jeff watson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:01:30 +0000

Lex.

Decent article.

Jeff