The “Car Grinder” and a Few Environmental Questions

We all know that certain things in our world are more attractive to males than females.  Little boys play with toy trucks, where little girls play with dolls.  As boys grow up, they are drawn to much larger pieces of machinery that are part of our real, practical world, e.g., trains.  But trains can’t touch this baby.

As cool as this thing is, it raises an interesting set of questions to environmentalists:

• What about recycling?  At the very least, doesn’t it make sense to separate out the tires and wheels?  (Waste-tires are a feedstock for gasifiers.) If we could separate out even more stuff, perhaps that waste stream, consisting mainly of steel, could be melted down and re-used.

• Think of the torque required to make this thing work.  That blade is only a few feet in radius, meaning that the force on the shaft must be enormous.  How does one build an engine with those characteristics: one that can momentarily stall, and then auto-set in reverse, all with a ridiculously high torque rating?  How much energy does it consume?

• What’s the trade-off between this and the age-old way of smashing and land-filling spent cars?

• How will electric vehicles change all this?  Nissan LEAF owners, for instance, will almost never see the inside of a service station, given that their cars’ power trains will run hundreds of thousands of miles before they even need a tune-up.

In any case, as a guy, I have to admit that watching that machine in action appealed to a certain piece of my libido that (I believe anyway) somehow doesn’t correspond to that of the average woman.