Throw Your Dirty Dishes Away; You'll Just Make New Ones At Dinner
from the innovation-in-the-kitchen dept
We keep hearing about how 3D printers for rapid prototyping are getting closer and closer to going mainstream -- but they're still not there yet. While they're used in plenty of places, having them in more common usage could lead to quite a revolution in how people view the things that they own. Take, for example, some research being done to create recyclable dishes. The idea is that you have some raw material wafers in a machine, and you punch in what type and how many dishes you need (four place settings, please), and it makes the proper dishes on the spot. After you're done, you put them back into the machine and it deconstructs them back to the raw materials, which can be used again for the next meal. In the process it also cleans the material. It's not there yet (it can't get out grease and it hasn't figured out how to trim the excess material from smaller items like cups), but it does give one simple example of where all of this could eventually go. Not that recyclable dishes are in huge demand -- but the concept of using some kind of rapid construction machine to build tangible goods on demand has plenty of potential.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Broken Dishes
This would be an interesting way to do things, and the machine doesn't even have to be too small. As long as it is about the size of a dishwasher your good to go.
What do you do if you break one of these "recycle dishes"? Just toss all the peices in the machine and make another? Because that is a pretty handy feature.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Matter compiler
Very interesting stuff.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
More energy?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: More energy?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: More energy?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: More energy?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Instant replication is teleportation!
More useful is the ability to make dishes (or whatever) out of raw materials on the spot instead of making the dishes out of raw materials in a factory, trucking them out to retail stores, and taking them home from there.
In short, more entropy is generated by centralized construction and redistribution, than by distributed construction. But, cleaning probably generates more entropy than reconstruction.
Just imagine the handwringing that will go on when people can download their tools for free! And when organic substances can be downloaded too, you can be sure the food industry will try to sue you for sharing food!
Now if only I could send myself across the Internet instead of walking around. But, have you ever noticed that it takes a lot less time to carry disks around in your pocket than it does to send the same amount of information across the Internet? I wonder when the bandwidth of the Internet will exceed the bandwidth of feet.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Instant replication is teleportation!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Instant replication is teleportation!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]