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Analyzed from 253 words in the discussion.

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#strength#tensile#dirt#traditional#need#forever#plastics#where#something#rebar

Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Animats•38 minutes ago
Of course, you need "forever plastics" to make this work long term. It's like everything else where you have a material with decent compressive strength but weak tensile strength. You need something with some tensile strength to hold it together. That's what rebar does. It's why rebar rusting out destroys concrete structures. The same problem applies to geotextile containment of dirt. If the textile degrades, it's just a pile of dirt, in a place where a pile of dirt isn't enough.

The more traditional approach is to surround dirt or rubble with something that has more tensile strength. Some Egyptian pyramids were built that way. One of them fell down because the outward pressure from the load above was not sufficiently contained. Traditional stone construction of large structures is all about containing that outward push. That's what flying buttresses and bridge abutments do.

avesi•4 minutes ago
There appears to be a bamboo-derived plastic out there with high tensile strength, but I don't think it'd work for this application, because it degrades within 50 days of being buried in soil. I wonder if being in gravel would delay that, due to the different microbes present?

It seems like there are usually biobased solutions out there, but they aren't as cost-effective or easy to procure as the forever plastics, so organizations don't bother with them. Perhaps some kind of incentive would get us moving in the right direction.

40four•29 minutes ago
A few of my local parks have used this technique in their parking lots. I didn’t know they were called “geo-cells” so that’s interesting. They filled them with gravel, and it definitely seems to work well. I imagine it was a good way to save some budget versus a traditional paved parking lot
readthenotes1•about 3 hours ago
Interesting concept; horrible writing.
NSUserDefaults•about 3 hours ago
It's a transcript of the video, which I enjoyed.
KronisLV•about 3 hours ago
I found it okay! With how much AI slop is out there, human writing will usually make me appreciative.