Slow Chat

Oh did I forget, “more people fixated on controlling what others say online, to move or delete any post addressing reality versus fantasy.”

Failing to have AWES in automatically controlled operation, we have at least a well controlled AWE forum. This is in addition to AWE recent successes …

I can’t access the ResearchGate discussion. I tried to archive it, with limited succes

Anyway, sources needed.

I’m not sure if I care all that much about his “true recycling”. I care about this:

You can say that about anything, until you can’t.

On second thought, that discussion is a complete waste of time. Climate change deniers with strong opinions going against people with better critical thinking skills who are also mostly not experts. I can’t trust anything anyone says there without doing my own research. I would have hoped ResearchGate had better standards. It could do with some moderation.

1 Like

Perhaps opening an account to have access to ResearchGate can be required (although your second link seems to open more the discussion). For that a peer-reviewed publication can be required. Have you that?

True, although the majority of contributors to ResearchGate have peer-reviewed publications, which is the first criterion of the quality of expert which takes on its full meaning when the field of expertise applies to the subject considered. I think your second link provides more access to the discussion.
I precise Alex Kralj (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ales-Kralj) favors IPCC reports and has a lot peer-reviewed publications and a high impact of 56.33.
The discussion is complex and the IPCC reports are not the first concerns.

Who is you? It is quotes; not directly what I say.

Offer them your services.

I take your advice into account and withdraw my post with the quotes.

No, ResearchGate thinks I’m a bot. I don’t care to prove them right or wrong.

The French preciser != the English precise. A better phrase here would be I’ll point out that…

I rarely use anything other than the generic you on this forum.

You have re-edited your post, mentioning the name of the author I quoted instead of my name.

You have to re-edit this post as well.

I have edited my comment, for your benefit, not re-edited it. I’m not following or don’t agree I should edit my last comment. It clarifies my writing style, and answers your question, again for your benefit.

The facts on plastics recycling here in the U.S. are:

  1. The real reason was litter control - the drink industry went from returnable glass bottles that were washed then re-used, to disposable plastic containers that could not be returned for re-use, so people threw them out the car windows, making an increasing mess on the sides of the road. That was when controlling litter was combined with supposed energy savings from recycling plastic to implement recycling programs with dedicated return sites that took up valuable real estate and labor to run. China was willing to take all our recycling “waste” because they had the cheap labor required to sort the stuff, and lower standards for their products so the lower-quality of recycled plastic was OK with them. Even so, it took time, money, and machinery to transport the waste to ports, load it on ships, burn fuel to sail to China, pay to unload it and ground-transport it to a point of use, labor to sort and use, energy to melt down…
  2. A few years ago, China decided they had had enough of our waste plastic - their labor costs had risen, and they were increasingly pressured to improve product quality, therefore they lost interest in our waste as a resource.
  3. Today, much if not most “recycled” plastic containers end up in landfills after all the paperwork and rebates are finished. Nobody wants them.
  4. It’s well-known among those who pay attention that consumer recycling does not really save resources, but in fact uses more resources, burning more fossil fuels to run the program than it saves. - again, the real driving force is removal of litter from roadsides. If a bottle on the side of the road is worth a few cents to return, there will be some down-and-out person who will collect them to earn a few dollars to get through the day, maybe buy some food or more drugs. Meanwhile the expenses of the recycling program, starting with the time taken, the cost of the recycling “bins”, the cost of the real estate for the recycling centers, the amount of gasoline and diesel burned to cart all this trash around town in multiple steps, the labor to have the recycling stations manned and responsive to every homeless person who shows up with a trash-bag full of bottles and cans that must be sorted, counted, and paid for, the fuel to bring the “recycled” plastic to the final destinations, which is usually a landfill - the funny thing is, it’s gone from “don’t be a litterbug” to “we’re saving the world from global warming”, but the facts don’t bear out the hype - the “recycled” bottles are seldom even recycled these days, just thrown away like most everything else, making the entire complicated “recycling” system a fraud, and a waste of time and money except for helping to keep the roadsides free of plastic bottles and aluminum cans. Silica (glass) and Aluminum are the first and second most abundant elements in the Earth’s crust, so they are very cheap to produce in bulk, whereby it is just not usually very economical to recycle every bottle and can, although large metal objects (scrap metal) are still economical to recycle,
2 Likes

But we’re not trying to solve plastic recycling here. I think more concrete questions, that will yield more concrete answers, are: you’re using a lot of this UHMWPE rope, how can you use less of it (see Kitewinder’s and Ampyx’s testing for example), are there alternatives, and what can you do with it when it becomes unusable?

All this indicates that the flexible synthetic fabric wings, after short-term use, above all in crosswind operation, will go to the incinerator, as for UHMWPE rope but after a longer use.

It is therefore a burning problem (if I may say so) for the ecological aspect of the whole, and which must be considered.

Keep in mind that an AWES is not kitesurfing, as it involves a continuous use.

So a rigid wing, preferentially in recyclable material like aluminum, can be a solution for this issue.

Of course, all this only matters if one persists in aiming for commercialization.

This analysis of yours is too perfunctory to be of any use.

That is all your problem. Almost all the experts are on ResearchGate, which does not mean that all members of ResearchGate are necessarily experts.

On the other hand, we can be sure that those who are refused by ResearchGate are not and never will be experts, especially those who don’t care about their advice.

Did you consider SciHub? I am not really against pirating papers. Getting access to papers is like CD records in the nineties, SciHub is the Napster of academic publications

Me? Yes, I use SciHub, and LibGen, and… I’m very happy for their existence. I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing without them.

1 Like

I think the lesson here is real concerns for a clean planet are often outweighed by the clean & green fluff-hype, designed to overcome logic in well-meaning people through emotional appeal disguised as facts. It does indeed pay be somewhat skeptical of such claims and to do a little independent research, ask what may sometimes be uncomfortable questions, and possibly pull back the cover on feel-good fantasy, to get a glimpse of reality. It has often been observed that when “all” of the “experts” “agree” on some topic, that in itself can often be a negative indicator, preceding an unexpected paradigm shift.

This is like theater of the absurd. Cart ahead of the horse. As I’ve often said, AWE is like the proverbial 3 blind men trying to describe an elephant - except for one pesky detail - in this case there is no elephant (viable AWE system). Well over a decade of this endless busy-body activity “what if this?” and “what if that?”. The biggest psychological factor I see is people with too much time on their hands suffering from global warming derangement syndrome. Step one would be powering a single home, not these endless promises to power hundreds or thousands of homes “next year”. To me, it is a great comedy. Oh well you’ve gotta get SOMETHING out of it - at least we can maybe appreciate the humor.
The other consistently frustrating thing about most every article TRYING to discuss AWE is the “authors” know even less about AWE than the supposed practitioners. Half the articles I read still mention long-abandoned projects like Altaeros and Makani as though they are still in play! It’s all just one big echo chamber of ignorance! Less than worthless. :slight_smile:

2 Likes