• Question: as you design electricals what do you intend to do to solve the issues of noone using unwanted materials? which could therfore lead to a shortage of the mostly used materials

    Asked by staticshock to Ant, Dan, Matt, Mike, Steph on 14 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Matt Maddock

      Matt Maddock answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      I don’t really know! I guess we either need to find a way to make the useful materials out of the useless ones, or find completely new ways of doing things. It’s certainly an excellent question and a real problem – or it will be in the future.

      If you have any ideas, you could go a long way if you find some answers – you could get properly famous if you solve this problem!

    • Photo: Dan Veal

      Dan Veal answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Great question, it’s a HUGE topic that loads of people and governments worry about.

      Take oil, it not only is used to make petrol but also to make plastics (yep, the drink bottle you drink from is made partly of oil…), rubber, and goes into many chemicals, so it’s not just your gas tank that’s effected, it’s everything.

      The problem is, the “unwanted” materials are usually much more expensive to use, so companies want to save money and therefore use the cheap, common ones, that causes the same exact problem you say.

      So if you want to fix the problem, we have to be willing to sacrifice money for the environment.

      If you wanted to buy a bike for £100, would you be willing to pay £200 if it helped the environment cause it was made from less common/less harmful materials? It’s the big question!

    • Photo: Anthony Hollingsworth

      Anthony Hollingsworth answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      ive been considering moving into nuclear engineering, and there i would recommend burning the waste that is currently sitting around in barrels. this isnt done at the moment because its cheaper to make more waste than try and use whats already there it but I think it is a much better option all round, they just need more people with good ideas about how to do it

    • Photo: Mike Salter

      Mike Salter answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      Hi staticshock – I promised you an answer in the chat today – so here goes!

      You’re probably well aware that oil and coal are in short supply but there are plenty of other materials in short supply too such as gold, silver and copper which are widely used in electronics. It would be easy to think we should just use something else, but these materials are used because they’re good at what they do – for example gold is used to make high quality electronic contacts because it has high conductivity and doesn’t corrode easily.

      So if we swapped all the gold to something else, we’d probably end up with electronics that couldn’t work as quickly or were much less reliable. So to be honest, I don’t really know what the answer to these shortages is. Electronic recycling could be a way forward (where you extract some of the materials so they can be used again) but it’s expensive and we have to be careful that we don’t waste even more of the worlds scarce resources in the process.

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