Wildebeests wallpaper
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Artiodactyla
Family: Bovidae
Genus: Connochaetes
Species: Connochaetes gnou, Connochaetes taurinus
Wildebeests are a hooved ungulate and are actually a type of antelope. The common names of the two species are the Black Wildebeest (C. gnou) and the Blue Wildebeest (C. taurinus). The ones that we see on nature specials on television usually belong to the great herd of the Serengeti. They make a regular yearly migration that covers a round trip of 500 to 1,000 miles.
Recycled plastic to get clean bill of health
“Seeing what water-based plants were discharging into the environment made me start looking into different ways of recycling,” says DeLaurentiis, who is now at ECO2 Plastics in Riverbank, California. To clean up the industry and make it more profitable, DeLaurentiis has developed a system for stripping bottles before they are recycled that dispenses with water altogether so there is no waste to pollute water supplies.
Shredded bottles are first immersed in the solvent ethyl lactate to clean them, and then moved to a second chamber where they are blasted with liquid carbon dioxide to remove any remaining solvent. The solvent and CO2 are pumped into separate stills where both are boiled off and the evaporated solvent and CO2 captured so they can be reused. You can then remove the distillate at the bottom of the stills, mostly left-over solvent and contaminants from the bottles, and dispose of it as solid waste. The cleaned bottles can be melted down and processed into granules ready for reuse in the conventional way.
The new process is cheaper than the water-based one, as the ethyl lactate and CO2 are repeatedly reused. As there is no liquid waste, plants do not need special waste permits, further reducing the running costs.
As you might already know plastic recycling is an environmental trade-off. On the front end we all feel like we’re helping the environment by recycling our plastics ( a petroleum product) rather then letting them sens them to the dump. The back end is where the bad stuff starts. 500 grams of recycled material required the use of 2 liters of water. That water was contaminated and while some plants made an effort at removing some of the pollutants, collectively recycling plants around the world dumped tones of small pieces of plastic, bottle labels and processing chemicals into rivers and lakes every year.
