Summary of Local Production

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We’ve covered quite a bit of different products that can be made from carbon captured from air and hydrogen derived from water via electrolysis. Let’s summarise what all types of human needs could be met with the “area production” system where as much as possible of everyday needs are met by decentralised production.

Buildings, Municipal Infrastructure & Sanitation

Buildings can be made from plastics completely. An somewhat exotic example there is Futuro, designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in the 60s. Originally as a skiing hut.

J-P Kärnä, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

There are many other light-weight designs for dwellings usually utilising plastics either as walls or tent-like with fabric covering it. The trend is called micro-architecture.

Plastics such as PVC can be used to make ducts for power and telecoms inside the buildings.

PVC is also used in building products such as window frames and other profiles, floor and wall coverings, roofing sheets etc. Expanded polystyrene is another plastic used for home and sound insulation.

PVC also used to create piping for water and sewage piping to connect the buildings to water works and sewage system. The piping can be drawn under the sidewalks if the sidewalks are built from “tiles” that have housing for pipes as described in chapter 19. Since the pipes are flat, the sewage can be drawn with vacuum just like toilets work in ships. Self-printed sensors can monitor the system and detect leaks or blockages.

The black water cleaning done by taking out phosphorus for fertiliser manufacturing and powering the on its own self-generated power. The flocculation of organic material in waste water can be done with polymers.

Apart from basic infrastructure like plumbing and sidewalks, it is possible to do other urban furniture from plastics such as lamp posts, park benches, playgrounds, bus stops, signages, fences etc.

Construction also needs explosives like ANFO covered earlier.

Living & Health

Plastics as furniture has today rather negative image as cheap, environmentally damaging and rather tacky. Today plastics can however be recycled and tackiness is all about design and customer preferences. Plastics as material is maintenance-free, lightweight, can be used outdoors and can be transparent.  Many plastics are used in furniture like polypropylene, PVC, polyethylene. Nylon as fabric etc.

Not everything needs to be fully plastics based. In bathrooms instead of ceramics newer composites can eplaced them. For example, Woodio makes bathroom furniture like sinks, bathtubs from composite materials made from wood chips (70%) and resin (30%).

Most carpets, rugs and mats today are made from plastics like nylon, polypropylene and polyester and increasingly from recycled PET beverage bottles.

Ropes are made from nylon, polyester, polypropylene and aramid.

Clothes (think jackets, hats, sweaters, sweatpants, cloth diapers, gym clothes, hoodies, blankets, buttons, zippers etc.) from polyester, nylon and acrylic. Surfactant like LAS for washing were covered earlier.

http://bargainfurniturehub.com/types-plastic-furniture/

Polypropylene is used for cups, cutlery, caps, containers, housewares. It is also used for food packaging, sweet and snack wrappers, hinged caps, microwave-proof containers etc.

Bottles for water, soft drinks, juices and also cleaners are today made mostly from PET (polyethylene terephthalate). High density and low-density polyethylene are also used to make bottles for milk and shampoo.

Expanded polystyrene for keeping food cold or hot. Metal cans and containers are often coated with epoxy to prevent rusting, especially for foods like tomatoes that are acidic.

Toys are among other manufactured from high-density polyethylene (about third of worlds toys are made of it).

Similarly, 3D printing is used at least exploratory manner to make various sports equipment like tennis rackets, shin guards, headgear, running shoes etc.

Eyeglass frames are typically zyl (cellulose acetate), propionate, nylon or nylon blends and the glasses themselves are polycarbonates or some other proprietary plastics that allow for thinner high index lenses.

Diamonds are just carbon in a cubical crystal structure. Manufactured synthetically either with HPHT (high-pressure high-temperature) or CVD (chemical vapor deposition crystal formation) methods. Small impurities of nitrogen turn the diamonds into yellow and to blue when small amounts of boron are trapped in the crystal structure. Pink diamonds however get their color from small dislocations in their lattice without any additional elements making local production more difficult.

Some fashion designers use polypropylene to design jewelry instead of using gold or silver. So, when the need for a diamond necklace or ring presents itself, all the tools can be locally found.

Even when electric payment methods are gaining popularity, people prefer bank notes in many regions. Increasingly bank notes are made from plastics such as biaxially oriented polypropylene because they last much longer than paper notes and can have security features not possible with paper notes such use of metameric inks (human eye sees colors that have different spectral power distribution as the same color).

Bank notes are sometimes plastic. What happens when the capability to print bank notes is decentralized and everyone has the skills? I’ll leave solving this as an entry level challenge to the gentle reader.

Going around with large amounts of bank notes (or diamonds) has in the past required a bullet proof vest and other needs may also continue to exists. Such vests can be made from high molecular weight polyethylene.

As mentioned earlier whole antiseptic model of health care is built around plastics and is ultimately oil based. Antiseptic gloves are made of different polymers like latex, nitrile rubber, polyvinyl chloride and neoprene. Syringes are polypropylene or polyethylene. intravenous tubing from PVC, polyethylene, or polypropylene plastic. PVC tubing is softened with plasticizers, oxygen masks are made from transparent soft PVC etc.

Many medicines are oil-derived products as well.

Energy

We have a who multi-part mini-series of posts coming up from energy. Needless to say, there is a multitude of options ranging from solar and wind via biomatter to small modular reactors (nuclear) and geothermal. All by nature can decentral although you can build big units as well.

Food

Food production is by default already decentralised as it requires large swatches of land.

Plastics can be used to print the racks for vertical gardening farms. Nitrogen captured from air and turned to ammonium nitrate used as fertiliser, phosphorous captured from black waters and recycled back.

Over a slightly longer periods synthetic meat and other proteins offer identical food with a much smaller footprint.

Electronics

Printed electronics allows to produce thin film transistors, capacitors, coils or resistors, wires, batteries, antennas, even displays. This is significantly cheaper than production of traditional electronics.

Plastic processors could someday replace part of the processing needs.

Transportation & Logistics

Making car bodies from plastics has been possible for quite long time, 3D printing is also used to print airless tires and car seats. It is possible to 3d print an entire car.

https://www.3dnatives.com/en/uptis-3d-printed-tire-140620194/

An electric motor consists of a rotating rotor and a static stator. The stator contains copper windings that the electricity flows through. The metal can be recycled locally practically indefinitely. Plastics can be used to build the frame. Polymer frames are lightweight and easier to produce than aluminum ones used today. Lower weight is especially important in vehicles.

https://insideevs.com/news/357824/plastic-electric-motor-reduces-weight/

Other types of vehicles used in transportation and logistics like boats and drones are much easier to 3D-print with quite a galore of companies already busy in the area.

Mini-mills and welding

Metal is practically re-usable indefinitely. Mini-mills are small units where metals are melted using electric arc furnaces for re-use.

Acetylene is used in gas welding and cutting metal. Another option is arc welding that uses just electricity – either AC or DC.

Since the 1950s, acetylene has mainly been made by partial combustion of methane with high-temperature steam in a regenerative furnace (a furnace that uses part of the methane also as fuel or some other gaseous fuel and air to support the combustion). Acetylene is odorless, colorless and easily flammable, this is why it is normally made on-site to avoid dangers during transport.

And then some

Just to add to the list of things, we’ve covered colorants, paints, rubbers, adhesives and pesticides as additional product categories that are oil-based to a large degree.

Summary

All the products mentioned in this chapter are based on fossil oil today and can in future be done by the air-refinery concept. The miniaturization of chemical processing and production with flow chemistry and 3D printing and CNC machines is making a decentralized world possible, although it needs to be said, not necessarily likely. There needs to be a will for the world to move to a more resilient direction.

3D printing plastics uses thermoplastic. This means that the materials are recyclable. Worn-out products can be grinded, melted and use the materials for the next product. There is some material loss between stages, but you can think of this as storing carbon dioxide and suns energy into matter and recycling it for a long time, making all kinds of products.

One of the benefits of this model is that it is very robust against white swans like global pandemics that spread rapidly throughout the world. The current mode and local production are not either mutually exclusive but can co-exists. People can increase the amount of local production or not depending on their preferences.

Next: Energy (new topic)