What is expendable?
They still let me be a blue sky thinker here...
It is so obvious that we are biased in building papermachines that we have a difficult time thinking, light, throwaway and so forth. So I force myself to think that way.
What components of a papermachine are stout by default and could be built more economically another way without sacrificing performance? Could we make an economically function paper machine out of paper? A wild question.
One area where we could start is centrifugal cleaners. I know this because of my experience with a stem cell transplant. when they are harvesting your stem cells, the procedure is to pull out your blood, spin them to separate them by density and pull off exactly those with the correct density to be identified as stem cells. It is a continuous, not a batch process and takes about four hours a day for up to five days.
When this was described to me, I thought of cleaners like we have on a paper machine. My next question was, how do you clean the equipment to hospital standards? The answer was simple--all the parts that touch your blood are one use disposable.
Now, hopefully, your blood does not contain sand or grit. You'll also want to get more than four hour use out of your centrifugal cleaners, but this is a place to start if we think about disposable paper machines.
Of special note...
In a couple of months, we will be moving this column to the Light Green Machine Institute website. There is not much there right now, but you might as well get signed up and start thinking about moving over there. It is at
www.lightgreenmachine.institute.
