Originally published November 27 2005
MIT student invents a dish making machine
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
MIT Media Lab's Counter Intelligence Group has overseen grad student Leonardo Bonanni's development of the Dishmaker, a machine that makes recyclable dishes.
Designed by MIT grad student Leonardo Bonanni, the DishMaker frees space in dish cabinets and reduces landfill trash.
It also uses less energy to recycle dishes than factories use to make them.
And, because the machine can produce up to 150 items, a dinner host would never be short of table settings when unexpected guests arrive: Cooks can select the number of place settings needed using a simple push-button control panel.
The prototype DishMaker is the size of a standard dishwasher, and uses the heating element of a toaster oven to shape the items.
To recycle the dishes, it heats them to about 300 degrees Fahrenheit to soften the acrylic, then a press restores them to wafers for easy stacking.
The wafers produce plates that are only 6 inches in diameter, the size of an average salad or dessert plate, but the machine can be adapted to use larger wafers.
The heating process gets rid of some food and sterilizes the dishes, but doesn't solve the problem of food grease, which tends to settle into the plastic.
"We can obviously just stick a dishwasher on the machine, but we're still investigating ways that would wash dishes without water," Bonanni says.
"If you made and recycled one of our plates three times a day for a year, the energy that goes into that is comparable to the energy required to make one ceramic plate (in a factory) because the ceramic is fired at about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit," says Bonanni.
Bonanni says recycling efforts often pose a trade-off between reduced waste and consumption, and the amount of energy required to achieve those aims through recycling.
But his device doesn't require people to collect and process the refuse, and uses little energy to recycle it.
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