The Seasteading Institute

I saw somewhere on the site someone mentioned that a Seasteader might find packaging materials to be an annoyance that perhaps would be eliminated or reduced by re-packing from “manufacturers ridiculous amounts” and leaving the crap behind.

• Here’s another take on that. It’s quite likely that a Seassteader would be choosy about the method of packing goods. Just perhaps not in quite the way that poster thinks.
• Most manufacturers don’t add extra packaging except for small, one-off retail items.
• Packaging costs are significant in manufacturing and nobody wants to spend ewaste money.
• So packaging is designed to make sure that contents arrive where they need to be intact. That’s a good thing. In fact, Seasteaders could possibly have higher standards for packing delicate or costly items, because of the difficulty and expense of replacing items damaged in shipping.
• Plus, the packaging itself could be useful to a Seastead where it’s just more landfill material to most people. Wooden pallets have become a valued commodity in recent years, where they were conssidered too cheap to bother re-using a few decades ago. Cardboard has a lot of uses, and can typically be used over and over again. I’ve recently seen boxes printed from the manufacturer with the advice “Use this box at least 5 times before discarding. Do Not Cut.” Even styrofoam can make a good insulator.

I imagine the wise seasteader would tend towards preferring items made of glass, metal, and wood over plastic anyway, simply for the ability to reuse or remanufacture the item when broken. Or failing that, items and packaging that may be safely and soundly incinerated at relatively low temperatures without too much specialized equipment.

Any steam turbine that is made to be able to feed any size of any conceivably burnable material in as fuel is not likely to be very efficient. Consistent fuel feeding is a necessity for any kind of power generation. And many types of materials for packaging require more energy to burn than they release, particularly at lower tempreatures, and high-temp incinerators require considerably more design work than a simple burn barrel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration#Use_of_heat

Pollution is often in the eye of the beholder.

• There is so much stuff dumped in the ocean every day that causes no harm because the ocean is such a large system that it can handle a lot of it.
• Volume has a lot to do with it. Smoke from a campfire is not pollution but smoke from a million industrial smokestacks is.
• Dumping non-toxic things which don’t float into the ocean will piss off some people, but not most reasonable people.
• On the other hand, if you plan to spend decades inone place, you don’t want the ocean floor under you to get clutterred and untidy.

Th ebiggest problem with dumping metal stuff over the side is that it is wasteful. Materials have awhole new value when they become scarcer and more expesnive to transport. When we finally make it to the moon, we won’t have to worry much about trash being strewn across the place because every BIT of processed material will find its way into use over and over again. I would bet on tons of extremely innovative recycling techniques coming out of the seastead movement, because necessity is the mother of invention.

“Setting up a regular sewage treatment plant could perhaps be possible of course. “

• Probably not practical, if by “regular” you mean a conventional land-based sewage treatment facilty as practiced in the United States. That is a very large facility, with various settling, holding, and aerating tanks, additives to increase precipitation of solid wastes, and it takes time to process. Then the solid waste disposal becomes another issue, because it’s still not entirely “safe”. Even on land, that type of system has its critics for being expensive, wasteful in terms of energy, space, and cost, when there are other more natural options.
• Regular wastewater treatment plants also have infrastructure problems relating to greywater/blackwater systems all feeding into it. Storm water run-off tends to overwhelm the facilities, and really doesn’t need “treatment” anyway. A seastead should probably seperate and re-use greywater before adding it to blackwater treatment. In addition, you’ll have seawater systems. I don’t know what effect seawater will have on treating your wastes biologically, when it comes to composting etc.
• More than just biological inputs accrete in municipal sewer systems. There are still alot of dumb-asses that dump used motoroil down the drain, and other toxic crap. Waste water treatment plants have to deal with that, which they sometimes do quite poorly, but still, it’s a design consideration. If a seastead fdoes this kind of thing, they will quickly poison themselves. There just won’t be the redundancy built into the system to handle that.

I had a few thoughts about using mushrooms as well. I think its quite possible (I have a fair bit of shroom cultivation experience.) My only concern would be infections, mycelium is quite easily infected and could render the mushrooms inedible. Commercial mushroom substrate is almost always sterilized in a large pressure cooking drum. Mushrooms would probably do quite well on sterile precomposted waste.

I think that an efficient eco/bio friendly waste disposal system is something that will not only benefit seasteaders but land dwellers and space travellers.

If you were growing shrooms using liquid faeces you might be able to grow them on a perlite substrate in trays 2 to 3 inches deep the liquid sewerage could flow at a depth of maybe one inch through the bottom of the perlite. This is just a theory and a proper mycologist should be consulted.