Educating Students Around the World in Materials Analysis and Characterization

In addition to my writings on this blog, I have written most of the website content for my materials analysis laboratory, Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc.  That website consists of nearly 80 pages of information about the laboratory, materials analysis techniques, applications of materials characterization to a wide range of materials to make better use of materials and better products, information about the industries, companies, universities, and governmental agencies we support, and background and specialization information about our scientists.

AME's Dr. Kevin Wepasnick is a home brew-master. He recently collaborated with C&EN, a publication of the American Chemical Society, to make a helium beer. Helium actually is soluble in beer, gives it a very fine head, and maintains a very rich and creamy taste. But it has a much lower solubility than carbon dioxide does and does not create the carbonic acid that CO2 does. Carbonic acid gives beer a sharper taste.  Consequently, helium beer is quite flat.  Because the solubility of helium is very low, Kevin used a much higher pressure of helium in the brewing process. Due to that high pressure, much of the brewing was performed in our laboratory at Anderson Materials Evaluation using higher pressure hardware than is used for the usual carbon dioxide beer. See the C&EN video at www.andersonmaterials.com/beer.  Note the remark that our AME logo is Tight!

An incredible number of students are coming to our website to learn about analytical techniques and materials characterization. In just the last week, about 100 university internet users came to our website. Visitors came from Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, the Universities of Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, Wisconsin, Colorado, Ohio State, Texas Tech, Virginia Tech, Cal Poly, UCLA, UC at Davis, Oregon State, Michigan State, U. of Rochester, RIT, Case Western Reserve U., Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, Mississippi State, Kent State, SUNY at Potsdam, Lehigh, Arizona State, Missouri U. of Sci. & Tech., Carnegie Mellon, U. of Pittsburgh, Northeastern U., UMBC, George Mason U., Purdue U., Washington State, and many more have visited in the last week.  Visitors from McGill, U. of Toronto, U. of Alberta, U. of Calgary, and other colleges in Canada visited the AME website.

In the United Kingdom, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Universities of Strathclyde, Sheffield, Southhampton, Northhampton, Windsor, Reading, Bath, Leeds, and Birmingham have provided visitors. In the rest of Europe: Uppsala U., Ecole de technologie superieure, U. of Ulm, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz U. Hannover, Picardie U., U. of Mons, Flinders U., U. College of Dublin, Waterloo U., U. Libre de Bruxelles, and others have visited. Many South American, Middle Eastern, African, Indian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese university visitors have also been to our website in the last week. AME is certainly doing its part to educate the world in materials science and engineering!

20 Years of Materials Analysis by Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc.

Today is not only Bastille Day, but it is also the 20th Anniversary of the founding of Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc.  For 20 years we have been providing high quality materials analysis and characterization services in our laboratory to our discerning customers.  We want to thank you for using our analytical services and for making it possible for us to enjoy solving many challenging and fun materials problems, while helping you to improve your products and processing operations.

The founder, Dr. Charles Anderson, wants to thank his business partner, Dr. Lorrie Krebs, for her many years of highly dedicated effort in making this 20-year record possible.  He wishes to thank Dr. Kevin Wepasnick for his great contributions for the last several years, all of which have been during the on-going Obama Socialist Recession.  Many other employees have made great contributions in the earlier years, which are also much appreciated.  Many interns have both given us the pleasure of teaching them the science we love so much and have contributed to our work in most cases quite ably.

Excessive Recycling

A great deal of taxpayer money is being wasted by many local governments on excessive levels of waste material recycling according to J. Winston Porter, President of the Waste Policy Center.  It turns out that excessive recycling may not only be an unwise use of your personal time, but it can be more environmentally damaging and costly than dumping waste into landfills.

From 1985 to 1989, Dr. Porter was the Assistant Administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency Response at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In this capacity, he served as the national program manager for the Superfund and RCRA (Resource Conservation and Recovery Act) programs.  He set an EPA goal at that time for 25% recycling of all municipal solid waste (MSW).

Porter supports the recycling of about one-third of MSW.  This is about the national rate of recycling now.  The EPA has set a target of 35%.  In the Washington Metro area, several counties are recycling at higher rates.  Montgomery County recycles 44.2% of its MSW, Arlington County recycles 42.8%, and Fairfax County recycles 40% of its trash.

Montgomery County has a formal goal to recycle 50% of MSW and forces every county business to file a recycling report every year with the county.  It spends $18.8 million a year on residential recycling pick-ups alone.  It also runs ads in Spanish on Fox News telling Spanish speakers listening to Fox News in English that it is the law that they must recycle in Montgomery County!  Much more is spent on commercial education and enforcement, recycling center operations, and other programs.  The Montgomery County Recycling Chief, Eileen Kao, does not know what the total cost is.  This is rather reminiscent of the school board not knowing what the public school cost per student is in the county!  Taxpayer money is just too easy to come by for anyone to worry very much about how it is spent.  Recycling in the Democrat suburbs of the area is popular, even if it is carried out beyond rational levels.

Porter notes that landfills are readily available in most of the country and they are now much safer and cleaner.  They are better located, much hazardous waste is now excluded, there are methane gas and surface water controls, and nearby ground water is better monitored.  Liners and leachate collection systems are used in most new landfills.  Much of our trash can now rest peacefully in landfills with no real environmental consequences.

Kenneth Green, an environmental scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, says that recycling aluminum cans and white office paper usually makes sense.  However, recycling much of the remaining trash is neither environmentally nor economically sensible.  For instance, recycling glass, as we must do in Montgomery County, makes no sense.  Ground glass is essentially sand, so it can sit peaceably in landfills.  Recycling this heavy material with movement in trucks and processing for reuse, costs more energy than the use of sand to simply make new glass.  But, local governments that want bragging rights for their high recycling percentages, love recycling glass because it is relatively heavy and the goals are measured by weight!

According to the EPA, in 2008, about 56% of paper was recycled, 7.1% of plastic, 23.1% of glass, and 21.1% of aluminum.  About 33.2% of all waste was recycled.  The bulk of the paper is either corrugated boxes, of which 70% was recycled in 2002, or newspapers, of which 62% was recycled in 2002.  In 2002, only 54% of office paper was recycled and 47% of aluminum.  Interestingly, the white office paper that makes the most sense to recycle was less recycled than corrugated boxes and newsprint.  Another interesting observation is that aluminum does make sense to recycle, but the recycling of aluminum in 2008 was at a 21.1% level, which was less than half what was recycled in 2002 when 47% was recycled!  There is a curious inversion of logic here.  The more sense it makes to recycle a material, the less likely it is to be recycled!  Glass, newsprint, and corrugated boxes are more likely to be recycled than aluminum!  This is likely to be due to a simple fascination with bulk and weight, as opposed to economics.

Many states have set recycling goals at percentages well above rational levels.  Among these are:

At 70%:  Massachusetts, Rhode Island

At 65%:  New Jersey

At 55%:  Maine

At 50%:  California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia

At 45%:  District of Columbia

At 40%:  Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Texas

One area of good news is that since 1990, the generation of MSW has increased at about the same rate as the population has.  From 1980 to 1990, there was an increase of MSW by 34.9%, while the population grew by only 10.1%!  Thanks in good part to significant weight reductions in the packaging of products, the amount of waste per person has not increased since 1990.  In 1980, a 2-liter PET bottle weighed about 65 grams, but in 2002, it was only 47 grams.  An aluminum can in 1980 weighed 19 grams, but in 2002 it was down to 13 grams.  A glass soda bottle went from 255 grams to 165 grams.  A steel, tin-coated soup can went from 48 to 35 grams.  A half-pint milk carton dropped from 14 to 9 grams from 1980 to 2002.  In most cases these reductions in materials use required improved materials and improved processing of materials.  This is work my laboratory plays a role in with its materials characterization, failure analysis, and quality control services.