More sustainable epoxy thanks to phosphorus

Somewhat unrelated: If you use epoxy for repairs, particularly of plastics (though I just used some for a wood repair), get yourself some fiberglass tape/fabric to use with it. Sometimes I'll lay the tape over the repair, sometimes I'll cut it up into little fragments and mix it directly in the epoxy (depending on if the epoxy is the bulk of the repair, like filling in a hole, or if I'm trying to repair a crack.

Also, if you are repairing plastic, consider "hot staples". A friend of mine just educated me on that 6 months ago, and I'm using them all the time, a starter kit costs around $50 though. This is a good, quick demo of them: https://youtube.com/shorts/43TDecNqTco?si=xsDJ3n7KMjpg8NVw

OT: It's difficult for me with my imperfect vision to read this web page because of inadequate contrast between body-text and background. Firefox dev tools measures a 3.52 contrast ratio — WCAG guidelines recommend 7:1 (AAA rating) or 4.5:1 (AA rating). However, viewing the page in reader mode seems to work as a solution.

There are two recycling mechanisms:

> After use, the material can simply be ground into powder and pressed into a new shape while heated, causing the bonds to rearrange themselves. This is known as thermomechanical recycling.

> it can also be chemically dissolved

I wonder whether either of these opens up any practical durability issues for this variety of epoxy.

This looks like recycling fetishism. It's perfectly fine to burn such materials, if they were obtained from non-fossil sources to start with, so there would be no net CO2 addition to the atmosphere.

It appears we got a relevant XKCD just in time: https://xkcd.com/3194/

when I hear of industrial uses of phosphorus my ears prick up since phosphorus is a key limiting factor for life.

A world where this actually became industrially very successful combined with a lack of recycling could potentially add large new sink for phosphorus.

In general, be careful when creating a process which locks meaningful amount of phosphorus out of the biosphere.

This is a presser (disguised as a science piece) from the company behind this; take it all with a grain of salt.

Also, epoxy already contains harmful endocrine disruptors, adding forever chemicals like those found in almost all flame retardants is just adding fuel to the fire (pun not intended).