Rachel's #913: THE TRUTH ABOUT RECYCLING

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At 11:41 AM 7/5/07, you wrote:

>The Economist, Jun. 7, 2007

>[Printer-friendly version]

>

>THE TRUTH ABOUT RECYCLING

>

>As the importance of recycling becomes more apparent, questions about

>it linger. Is it worth the effort? How does it work? Is recycling

>waste just going into a landfill in China? Here are some answers

>

>It is an awful lot of rubbish. Since 1960 the amount of municipal

>waste being collected in America has nearly tripled, reaching 245m

>tonnes in 2005. According to European Union statistics, the amount of

>municipal waste produced in western Europe increased by 23% between

>1995 and 2003, to reach 577kg per person. (So much for the plan to

>reduce waste per person to 300kg by 2000.) As the volume of waste has

>increased, so have recycling efforts. In 1980 America recycled only

>9.6% of its municipal rubbish; today the rate stands at 32%. A similar

>trend can be seen in Europe, where some countries, such as Austria and

>the Netherlands, now recycle 60% or more of their municipal waste.

>Britain's recycling rate, at 27%, is low, but it is improving fast,

>having nearly doubled in the past three years.

>

>Even so, when a city introduces a kerbside recycling programme, the

>sight of all those recycling lorries trundling around can raise doubts

>about whether the collection and transportation of waste materials

>requires more energy than it saves. " We are constantly being asked: Is

>recycling worth doing on environmental grounds? " says Julian Parfitt,

>principal analyst at Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a non-

>profit British company that encourages recycling and develops markets

>for recycled materials.

>

>Studies that look at the entire life cycle of a particular material

>can shed light on this question in a particular case, but WRAP decided

>to take a broader look. It asked the Technical University of Denmark

>and the Danish Topic Centre on Waste to conduct a review of 55 life-

>cycle analyses, all of which were selected because of their rigorous

>methodology. The researchers then looked at more than 200 scenarios,

>comparing the impact of recycling with that of burying or burning

>particular types of waste material. They found that in 83% of all

>scenarios that included recycling, it was indeed better for the

>environment.

>

>Based on this study, WRAP calculated that Britain's recycling efforts

>reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by 10m-15m tonnes per year. That

>is equivalent to a 10% reduction in Britain's annual carbon-dioxide

>emissions from transport, or roughly equivalent to taking 3.5m cars

>off the roads. Similarly, America's Environmental Protection Agency

>estimates that recycling reduced the country's carbon emissions by 49m

>tonnes in 2005.

>

>Recycling has many other benefits, too. It conserves natural

>resources. It also reduces the amount of waste that is buried or

>burnt, hardly ideal ways to get rid of the stuff. (Landfills take up

>valuable space and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas; and although

>incinerators are not as polluting as they once were, they still

>produce noxious emissions, so people dislike having them around.) But

>perhaps the most valuable benefit of recycling is the saving in energy

>and the reduction in greenhouse gases and pollution that result when

>scrap materials are substituted for virgin feedstock. " If you can use

>recycled materials, you don't have to mine ores, cut trees and drill

>for oil as much, " says Jeffrey Morris of Sound Resource Management, a

>consulting firm based in Olympia, Washington.

>

>Extracting metals from ore, in particular, is extremely energy-

>intensive. Recycling aluminium, for example, can reduce energy

>consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower

>but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for

>paper and 30% for glass. Recycling also reduces emissions of

>pollutants that can cause smog, acid rain and the contamination of

>waterways.

>

>A brief history of recycling

>

>The virtue of recycling has been appreciated for centuries. For

>thousands of years metal items have been recycled by melting and

>reforming them into new weapons or tools. It is said that the broken

>pieces of the Colossus of Rhodes, a statue deemed one of the seven

>wonders of the ancient world, were recycled for scrap. During the

>industrial revolution, recyclers began to form businesses and later

>trade associations, dealing in the collection, trade and processing of

>metals and paper. America's Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries

>(ISRI), a trade association with more than 1,400 member companies,

>traces its roots back to one such organisation founded in 1913. In the

>1930s many people survived the Great Depression by peddling scraps of

>metal, rags and other items. In those days reuse and recycling were

>often economic necessities. Recycling also played an important role

>during the second world war, when scrap metal was turned into weapons.

>

>As industrial societies began to produce ever-growing quantities of

>garbage, recycling took on a new meaning. Rather than recycling

>materials for purely economic reasons, communities began to think

>about how to reduce the waste flow to landfills and incinerators.

>Around 1970 the environmental movement sparked the creation of

>America's first kerbside collection schemes, though it was another 20

>years before such programmes really took off.

>

>In 1991 Germany made history when it passed an ordinance shifting

>responsibility for the entire life cycle of packaging to producers. In

>response, the industry created Duales System Deutschland (DSD), a

>company that organises a separate waste-management system that exists

>alongside public rubbish-collection. By charging a licensing fee for

>its " green dot " trademark, DSD pays for the collection, sorting and

>recycling of packaging materials. Although the system turned out to be

>expensive, it has been highly influential. Many European countries

>later adopted their own recycling initiatives incorporating some

>degree of producer responsibility.

>

>In 1987 a rubbish-laden barge cruised up and down America's East Coast

>looking for a place to unload, sparking a public discussion about

>waste management and serving as a catalyst for the country's growing

>recycling movement. By the early 1990s so many American cities had

>established recycling programmes that the resulting glut of materials

>caused the market price for kerbside recyclables to fall from around

>$50 per ton to about $30, says Dr Morris, who has been tracking prices

>for recyclables in the Pacific Northwest since the mid-1980s. As with

>all commodities, costs for recyclables fluctuate. But the average

>price for kerbside materials has since slowly increased to about $90

>per ton.

>

>Even so, most kerbside recycling programmes are not financially self-

>sustaining. The cost of collecting, transporting and sorting materials

>generally exceeds the revenues generated by selling the recyclables,

>and is also greater than the disposal costs. Exceptions do exist, says

>Dr Morris, largely near ports in dense urban areas that charge high

>fees for landfill disposal and enjoy good market conditions for the

>sale of recyclables.

>

>Sorting things out

>

>Originally kerbside programmes asked people to put paper, glass and

>cans into separate bins. But now the trend is toward co-mingled or

> " single stream " collection. About 700 of America's 10,000 kerbside

>programmes now use this approach, says Kate Krebs, executive director

>of America's National Recycling Coalition. But the switch can make

>people suspicious: if there is no longer any need to separate

>different materials, people may conclude that the waste is simply

>being buried or burned. In fact, the switch towards single-stream

>collection is being driven by new technologies that can identify and

>sort the various materials with little or no human intervention.

>Single-stream collection makes it more convenient for householders to

>recycle, and means that more materials are diverted from the waste

>stream.

>

>San Francisco, which changed from multi to single-stream collection a

>few years ago, now boasts a recycling rate of 69% -- one of the

>highest in America. With the exception of garden and food waste, all

>the city's kerbside recyclables are sorted in a 200,000-square-foot

>facility that combines machines with the manpower of 155 employees.

>The $38m plant, next to the San Francisco Bay, opened in 2003.

>Operated by Norcal Waste Systems, it processes an average of 750 tons

>of paper, plastic, glass and metals a day.

>

>The process begins when a truck arrives and dumps its load of

>recyclables at one end of the building. The materials are then piled

>on to large conveyer belts that transport them to a manual sorting

>station. There, workers sift through everything, taking out plastic

>bags, large pieces of cardboard and other items that could damage or

>obstruct the sorting machines. Plastic bags are especially troublesome

>as they tend to get caught in the spinning-disk screens that send

>weightier materials, such as bottles and cans, down in one direction

>and the paper up in another.

>

>Corrugated cardboard is separated from mixed paper, both of which are

>then baled and sold. Plastic bottles and cartons are plucked out by

>hand. The most common types, PET (type 1) and HDPE (type 2), are

>collected separately; the rest go into a mixed-plastics bin.

>

>Next, a magnet pulls out any ferrous metals, typically tin-plated or

>steel cans, while the non-ferrous metals, mostly aluminium cans, are

>ejected by eddy current. Eddy-current separators, in use since the

>early 1990s, consist of a rapidly revolving magnetic rotor inside a

>long, cylindrical drum that rotates at a slower speed. As the

>aluminium cans are carried over this drum by a conveyer belt, the

>magnetic field from the rotor induces circulating electric currents,

>called eddy currents, within them. This creates a secondary magnetic

>field around the cans that is repelled by the magnetic field of the

>rotor, literally ejecting the aluminium cans from the other waste

>materials.

>

>Finally, the glass is separated by hand into clear, brown, amber and

>green glass. For each load, the entire sorting process from start to

>finish takes about an hour, says Bob Besso, Norcal's recycling-

>programme manager for San Francisco.

>

>Although all recycling facilities still employ people, investment is

>increasing in optical sorting technologies that can separate different

>types of paper and plastic. Development of the first near-infra-red-

>based waste-sorting systems began in the early 1990s. At the time

>Elopak, a Norwegian producer of drink cartons made of plastic-

>laminated cardboard, worried that it would have to pay a considerable

>fee to meet its producer responsibilities in Germany and other

>European countries. To reduce the overall life-cycle costs associated

>with its products, Elopak set out to find a way to automate the

>sorting of its cartons. The company teamed up with SINTEF, a Norwegian

>research centre, and in 1996 sold its first unit in Germany. The

>technology was later spun off into a company now called TiTech.

>

>TiTech's systems -- more than 1,000 of which are now installed

>worldwide -- rely on spectroscopy to identify different materials.

>Paper and plastic items are spread out on a conveyor belt in a single

>layer. When illuminated by a halogen lamp, each type of material

>reflects a unique combination of wavelengths in the infra-red spectrum

>that can be identified, much like a fingerprint. By analysing data

>from a sensor that detects light in both the visible and the near-

>infra-red spectrum, a computer is able to determine the colour, type,

>shape and position of each item. Air jets are then activated to push

>particular items from one conveyor belt to another, or into a bin.

>Numerous types of paper, plastic or combinations thereof can thus be

>sorted with up to 98% accuracy.

>

>For many materials the process of turning them back into useful raw

>materials is straightforward: metals are shredded into pieces, paper

>is reduced to pulp and glass is crushed into cullet. Metals and glass

>can be remelted almost indefinitely without any loss in quality, while

>paper can be recycled up to six times. (As it goes through the

>process, its fibres get shorter and the quality deteriorates.)

>

>Plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, are somewhat different.

>Although they have many useful properties -- they are flexible,

>lightweight and can be shaped into any form -- there are many

>different types, most of which need to be processed separately. In

>2005 less than 6% of the plastic from America's municipal waste stream

>was recovered. And of that small fraction, the only two types recycled

>in significant quantities were PET and HDPE. For PET, food-grade

>bottle- to-bottle recycling exists. But plastic is often " down-cycled "

>into other products such as plastic lumber (used in place of wood),

>drain pipes and carpet fibres, which tend to end up in landfills or

>incinerators at the end of their useful lives.

>

>Even so, plastics are being used more and more, not just for

>packaging, but also in consumer goods such as cars, televisions and

>personal computers. Because such products are made of a variety of

>materials and can contain multiple types of plastic, metals (some of

>them toxic), and glass, they are especially difficult and expensive to

>dismantle and recycle.

>

>Europe and Japan have initiated " take back " laws that require

>electronics manufacturers to recycle their products. But in America

>only a handful of states have passed such legislation. That has caused

>problems for companies that specialise in recycling plastics from

>complex waste streams and depend on take-back laws for getting the

>necessary feedstock. Michael Biddle, the boss of MBA Polymers, says

>the lack of such laws is one of the reasons why his company operates

>only a pilot plant in America and has its main facilities in China and

>Austria.

>

>Much recyclable material can be processed locally, but ever more is

>being shipped to developing nations, especially China. The country has

>a large appetite for raw materials and that includes scrap metals,

>waste paper and plastics, all of which can be cheaper than virgin

>materials. In most cases, these waste materials are recycled into

>consumer goods or packaging and returned to Europe and America via

>container ships. With its hunger for resources and the availability of

>cheap labour, China has become the largest importer of recyclable

>materials in the world.

>

>The China question

>

>But the practice of shipping recyclables to China is controversial.

>Especially in Britain, politicians have voiced the concern that some

>of those exports may end up in landfills. Many experts disagree.

>According to Pieter van Beukering, an economist who has studied the

>trade of waste paper to India and waste plastics to China: " as soon as

>somebody is paying for the material, you bet it will be recycled. "

>

>In fact, Dr van Beukering argues that by importing waste materials,

>recycling firms in developing countries are able to build larger

>factories and achieve economies of scale, recycling materials more

>efficiently and at lower environmental cost. He has witnessed as much

>in India, he says, where dozens of inefficient, polluting paper mills

>near Mumbai were transformed into a smaller number of far more

>productive and environmentally friendly factories within a few years.

>

>Still, compared with Western countries, factories in developing

>nations may be less tightly regulated, and the recycling industry is

>no exception. China especially has been plagued by countless illegal-

>waste imports, many of which are processed by poor migrants in China's

>coastal regions. They dismantle and recycle anything from plastic to

>electronic waste without any protection for themselves or the

>environment.

>

>The Chinese government has banned such practices, but migrant workers

>have spawned a mobile cottage industry that is difficult to wipe out,

>says Aya Yoshida, a researcher at Japan's National Institute for

>Environmental Studies who has studied Chinese waste imports and

>recycling practices. Because this type of industry operates largely

>under the radar, it is difficult to assess its overall impact. But it

>is clear that processing plastic and electronic waste in a crude

>manner releases toxic chemicals, harming people and the environment --

>the opposite of what recycling is supposed to achieve.

>

>Under pressure from environmental groups, such as the Silicon Valley

>Toxics Coalition, some computer-makers have established rules to

>ensure that their products are recycled in a responsible way. Hewlett-

>Packard has been a leader in this and even operates its own recycling

>factories in California and Tennessee. Dell, which was once criticised

>for using prison labour to recycle its machines, now takes back its

>old computers for no charge. And last month Steve Jobs detailed

>Apple's plans to eliminate the use of toxic substances in its

>products.

>

>Far less controversial is the recycling of glass -- except, that is,

>in places where there is no market for it. Britain, for example, is

>struggling with a mountain of green glass. It is the largest importer

>of wine in the world, bringing in more than 1 billion litres every

>year, much of it in green glass bottles. But with only a tiny wine

>industry of its own, there is little demand for the resulting glass.

>Instead what is needed is clear glass, which is turned into bottles

>for spirits, and often exported to other countries. As a result, says

>Andy Dawe, WRAP's glass-technology manager, Britain is in the

> " peculiar situation " of having more green glass than it has production

>capacity for.

>

>Britain's bottle-makers already use as much recycled green glass as

>they can in their furnaces to produce new bottles. So some of the

>surplus glass is down-cycled into construction aggregates or sand for

>filtration systems. But WRAP's own analysis reveals that the energy

>savings for both appear to be " marginal or even disadvantageous " .

>Working with industry, WRAP has started a new programme called

>GlassRite Wine, in an effort to right the imbalance. Instead of being

>bottled at source, some wine is now imported in 24,000-litre

>containers and then bottled in Britain. This may dismay some wine

>connoisseurs, but it solves two problems, says Mr Dawe: it reduces the

>amount of green glass that is imported and puts what is imported to

>good use. It can also cut shipping costs by up to 40%.

>

>The future of recycling

>

>This is an unusual case, however. More generally, one of the biggest

>barriers to more efficient recycling is that most products were not

>designed with recycling in mind. Remedying this problem may require a

>complete rethinking of industrial processes, says William McDonough,

>an architect and the co-author of a book published in 2002 called

> " Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things " . Along with

>Michael Braungart, his fellow author and a chemist, he lays out a

>vision for establishing " closed-loop " cycles where there is no waste.

>Recycling should be taken into account at the design stage, they

>argue, and all materials should either be able to return to the soil

>safely or be recycled indefinitely. This may sound like wishful

>thinking, but Mr McDonough has a good pedigree. Over the years he has

>worked with companies including Ford and Google.

>

>An outgrowth of " Cradle to Cradle " is the Sustainable Packaging

>Coalition, a non-profit working group that has developed guidelines

>that look beyond the traditional benchmarks of packaging design to

>emphasise the use of renewable, recycled and non-toxic source

>materials, among other things. Founded in 2003 with just nine members,

>the group now boasts nearly 100 members, including Target, Starbucks

>and Estee Lauder, some of which have already begun to change the

>design of their packaging.

>

>Sustainable packaging not only benefits the environment but can also

>cut costs. Last year Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, announced

>that it wanted to reduce the amount of packaging it uses by 5% by

>2013, which could save the company as much as $3.4 billion and reduce

>carbon-dioxide emissions by 667,000 tonnes. As well as trying to

>reduce the amount of packaging, Wal-Mart also wants to recycle more of

>it. Two years ago the company began to use an unusual process, called

>the " sandwich bale " , to collect waste material at its stores and

>distribution centres for recycling. It involves putting a layer of

>cardboard at the bottom of a rubbish compactor before filling it with

>waste material, and then putting another layer of cardboard on top.

>The compactor then produces a " sandwich " which is easier to handle and

>transport, says Jeff Ashby of Rocky Mountain Recycling, who invented

>the process for Wal-Mart. As well as avoiding disposal costs for

>materials it previously sent to landfill, the company now makes money

>by selling waste at market prices.

>

>Evidently there is plenty of scope for further innovation in

>recycling. New ideas and approaches will be needed, since many

>communities and organisations have set high targets for recycling.

>Europe's packaging directive requires member states to recycle 60% of

>their glass and paper, 50% of metals and 22.5% of plastic packaging by

>the end of 2008. Earlier this year the European Parliament voted to

>increase recycling rates by 2020 to 50% of municipal waste and 70% of

>industrial waste. Recycling rates can be boosted by charging

>households and businesses more if they produce more rubbish, and by

>reducing the frequency of rubbish collections while increasing that of

>recycling collections.

>

>Meanwhile a number of cities and firms (including Wal-Mart, Toyota and

>Nike) have adopted zero-waste targets. This may be unrealistic but

>Matt Hale, director of the office of solid waste at America's

>Environmental Protection Agency, says it is a worthy goal and can help

>companies think about better ways to manage materials. It forces

>people to look at the entire life-cycle of a product, says Dr Hale,

>and ask questions: Can you reduce the amount of material to begin

>with? Can you design the product to make recycling easier?

>

>If done right, there is no doubt that recycling saves energy and raw

>materials, and reduces pollution. But as well as trying to recycle

>more, it is also important to try to recycle better. As technologies

>and materials evolve, there is room for improvement and cause for

>optimism. In the end, says Ms Krebs, " waste is really a design flaw. "

>

>Web resources recommended by The Economist:

>

>William McDonough's book, Cradle to Cradle.

>

>The Environmental Protection Agency reports on waste and recycling.

>The Waste & Resources Action Programme has a profile of Julian

>Parfitt. The University of Amsterdam has a biography of Pieter van

>Beukering. See also William McDonough, the Danish Topic Centre on

>Waste and Resources, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries

>and TiTech.

 

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