What would a world look like if recycling reached 100%?
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Comment from a German specialist in a thread about this from 2017:
Die nicht recykelbaren Reste wie Lebensmittelreste, Farbauftrag oder irgendwelche Etiketten verbrennen in der Schmelze und treiben oben auf dem flüssigen Metall als Schlacke, die einfach abgeschöpft und entsorgt werden kann.
Translation:
The non-recyclable residues, such as food scraps, paint coatings or labels burn off in the melt and float to the top of the molten metal as slags, which can simply be skimmed off and disposed of.
I was a process engineer in an aluminum plant. While I didn't directly work in remelt, this is correct as I understand it.
20:1 is the net energy usage for new aluminum smelting:recycling.
Recycle your metals please.
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There's also the Guitang Group in China. They have a massive farm that grows sugar cane, which is processed at their sugar refinery and then sold. But the sugar refining process generates spent molasses, so they built a plant that takes the spent molasses and creates alcohol, which they then also sell.
The alcohol plant also creates alcohol residue, so they built a fertilizer plant that makes the alcohol residue into fertilizer, which they use on their sugar cane farm.
The sugar refinery also has crushed sugar cane as a result of their processing, so they built a plant to turn the crushed sugar cane into pulp, then a paper mill to turn the pulp into paper, which is sold.
The pulp plant creates a black liquid as a side product, so they send that through an alkali recovery process; the recovered alkali is sent back to the pulp plant to create more pulp.
The alkali recovery process also creates a white sludge byproduct so they built a cement mill. They take the white sludge from the alkali recovery process, along with the filter sludge that comes out of the sugar refinery, and make cement.
So they wanted to sell sugar, but they've limited pollution and waste, improved their plantation's output with inexpensive fertilizer, and also get to sell alcohol, paper and cement.
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Unless industry is using the raw material produced from recycling, we'll never get to 100% recycling. People throwing stuff in the blue bag or green bin, whatever it is in your region, that's only the first step. We are a long way off from 100%. We have countries who have refused to accept shipments of recycled products because there's no market for that material.
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I was a process engineer in an aluminum plant. While I didn't directly work in remelt, this is correct as I understand it.
20:1 is the net energy usage for new aluminum smelting:recycling.
Recycle your metals please.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/f5-Ljn7GX_8
This short explains the German mindset about recycling. The only difference is that in Germany, the letter would be laminated.
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Recycling is a fraud. It was invented by the oil and plastic industry to pass the blame to consumers and shield themselves from repercussions. While some plastics CAN be recycled, its only numbers 1-3, every other plastic cannot be recycled or its so expensive that companies had no incentive to do it, and this still doesn't include paper that also has a limit on what it can be recycled to.
SOME recycling is a fraud. Glass, metal and paper is great for recycling.
Plastic in general is just awful.
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Raw materials come from the ground. By your standards of “contamination” aren’t raw materials much more contaminated?
A lot of work goes into refining glass, aluminum, steel, copper etc. A lot of impurities have to be removed to make those materials for the first time.
Raw materials is not what we’re talking about here. Local recycling plants are not processing raw materials - that’s a completely different process. They are very limited systems designed to process consumer materials.
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Comment from a German specialist in a thread about this from 2017:
Die nicht recykelbaren Reste wie Lebensmittelreste, Farbauftrag oder irgendwelche Etiketten verbrennen in der Schmelze und treiben oben auf dem flüssigen Metall als Schlacke, die einfach abgeschöpft und entsorgt werden kann.
Translation:
The non-recyclable residues, such as food scraps, paint coatings or labels burn off in the melt and float to the top of the molten metal as slags, which can simply be skimmed off and disposed of.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t recycle, we of course should. But most local recycling plants don’t have that capability.
And the biggest problem are plastics - glass and metal materials are much more forgiving.
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Raw materials is not what we’re talking about here. Local recycling plants are not processing raw materials - that’s a completely different process. They are very limited systems designed to process consumer materials.
We’re talking about whether recycling is feasible.
Whether or not it is feasible is decided by how hard it is to do compared to just making new materials.
Your comment seemed to be saying the contaminates in recycling make them harder to recycle back to their raw materials (compared to making new raw materials).
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Comment from a German specialist in a thread about this from 2017:
Die nicht recykelbaren Reste wie Lebensmittelreste, Farbauftrag oder irgendwelche Etiketten verbrennen in der Schmelze und treiben oben auf dem flüssigen Metall als Schlacke, die einfach abgeschöpft und entsorgt werden kann.
Translation:
The non-recyclable residues, such as food scraps, paint coatings or labels burn off in the melt and float to the top of the molten metal as slags, which can simply be skimmed off and disposed of.
Yeah, contaminants aren't a big deal with metal recycling.
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Metallurgy isn't my field, but here's an educated guess...
There are different kinds of contaminants. In raw ore you largely have silicate rock and metals. In recycled material you have relatively pure metal (alloys), and a large variety of volatiles.
Now with ore you can grind it all into sand, sift it, and smelt all the heavy grains. The rock should mostly just separate from the metal, these are just phase changes. But with recycling, those volatiles are going to burn and some are going to react with the metals, changing the chemical makeup. And with ore, you basically know what minerals you're working with. With recycled materials, it's anyone's guess. Does this can contain some food residue? Or an oil? Perhaps chemical cleaning agents? Is another plastic container stuffed inside?
There's a lot of variables with recycled materials, I imagine it's hard to predict how some of those variables react.
For metals, it's pretty trivial to remove slag (contaminants) from the metal. Basically everything floats to the top and you can just scrape it off.
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Where I live it's only 1-2. Also, sorting is a challenge, and we often don't know if it actually gets recycled or ends up on a ship to India.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Ours just goes to the landfill. I happened to be behind one of the recycling trucks when I was on a dump run once, and it pulled into the same trash pile I did.
Stopped paying $25 a month for it when I got home.
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Raw materials is not what we’re talking about here. Local recycling plants are not processing raw materials - that’s a completely different process. They are very limited systems designed to process consumer materials.
Why not make better recycling plants?
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I want the easiest path to have the most pleasant shit in the morning i can possibly have in the future.
The future is now if you just take metamucil.
No really. Try it. Perfect shit every time.
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Recycling doesn’t work unless you have a respectful and intelligent society like Japan or South Korea. Americans would never follow the rules.
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Why not make better recycling plants?
Couldn’t agree more
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Everything would be a bit more efficient, a bit more interchangeable nine Ted. Landfills would fill a bit more slowly.
A useful step to reduce the growth of environmental damage, but not enough
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That would require a world without platic and where we dont make cheap things but quality that can be repaired
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Germany: okayyy here is how you properly recicle a tea bag
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Cleaner, though we'd have to exceed 100% to get everything out of the environment. That's a tall order for microplastics in particular - we're gonna have to live with Vitamin P for a long, long time. Maybe if they finally come up with a way to cheaply eat it with microbes without accidentally obliterating all plastics on earth. That would be inconvenient AF.
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Recycling doesn’t work unless you have a respectful and intelligent society like Japan or South Korea. Americans would never follow the rules.
Who the fuck mentioned america?
