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Bikes, bowling balls, and the delicate balancing act that is modern recycling

  • 12-12-2015 6:59pm
    #1
    Impetus
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,667 ✭✭✭


    A modern recycling plant is capital intensive. Conveyor belts carrying waste at high speed, determining items of value, and blowing them into piles of similar objects, after being recognized by sensors. Much like a mechanized mail or express document service sorting facility.

    "To take advantage of this, the Sims (a town near Brooklyn) facility has a series of optical scanners. These are reprogrammable so that it's possible to switch one from sorting out HDPE to PET without changing anything else about the processing lines. The optical scanners shine light down from over the conveyor and read the wavelengths that are reflected back to it. That way, it identifies where items with a specific composition are on the conveyor."

    Highly capital intensive, one would have thought. One also needs a large flow of waste to justify the cost. This is particularly an issue in countries with low population densities or small populations. You could probably put one in a port and import waste by sea. Malta (pop 440'000) sends much of its recycling by sea to Portugal.

    After sorting a huge variety of materials, they will need to be shipped in many cases to places like http://www.batteryrecycling.umicore.com/UBR/ which is in 2660 Hoboken (BE).

    Which makes me think that the most efficient recycling is well managed incinerator based high temp burning of most objects, where hot and chilled water derived from the process is piped directly to homes and offices nearby. This gives the lowest conversion loss and transport cost, and keeps the stuff local. Monaco is a prime example of this philosophy, and it enjoys the cheapest energy cost in Europe for home and office heating/cooling. They even take waste from local authorities in neighbouring France and Italy, as well as waste wood from the timber industry based in the Alps.

    http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/recycling-matching-high-tech-materials-science-with-economics-that-work/


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