Recycling

The debate over dumping trash versus recycling its reusable components has existed since the beginning of technology. New technologies have made the issues different and more complex, but they are nevertheless essentially housekeeping issues affecting every material and product used in society. Recycling can save resources, reduce toxic wastes in the ecosystem, and save space in landfills.

Background

A number of factors led to the recycling programs initiated in the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout history, waste disposal schemes have generally assumed that there was infinite sky and ocean to dilute wastes until they became undetectably faint. Then rivers began to catch fire, mercury was discovered in tuna caught at sea, forests in Scandinavia suffered from sulfur dioxide coming from British smokestacks, and people in the fishing village of Minamata, Japan, were poisoned by a vinyl factory that was dumping wastes into their bay. Many such instances finally led to the realization that the natural world was not an infinite sink and that humankind might be fouling its own nest. Hence, beginning in the 1970s, became a major political issue. A related concern was that fuels and certain key minerals might be exhausted in the near future because of the ever-expanding of nonrenewable resources. These fears were strongly presented in 1970 in “The First Report to the Club of Rome,” published as The Limits to Growth, based on a computer projection of population, food production, industry, resources, and pollution.

The “landfill crisis” in the United States began in the 1970s when environmental regulations restricted open dumps, backyard burning, and burning in apartment-sized incinerators. Restricted burning cleared the air but increased the burden on dumps. Other new regulations required greater use of sanitary landfills, in which trash is covered daily. Because trash in sanitary landfills has less environmental deterioration from fires, rain, and vermin, it requires as much as three times the cubic volume of old dumps.

Waste Streams

Wastes can be defined in a number of ways. Municipal solid waste (MSW), or trash, is the most commonly considered object of recycling. MSW is an almost infinitely varied mixture of newspapers, grass clippings, beverage containers, aerosol cans, old clothes, kitchen wastes, small appliances, and hundreds of other types of items. Calculations from the Environmental Protection Agency for 2018 estimated that roughly 292 million metric tons of municipal solid waste was generated in the United States that year (or 4.9 pounds per person per day). However, the numbers are more complicated than that. They do not include construction and demolition debris composed of bricks, wood, concrete, and fixtures taken when old structures are razed. They also do not include the liner and covering materials for the landfill. Finally, they do not include sewage sludge, composed of both food garbage that is ground up in garbage disposals and human wastes. With those additions, the average daily weight produced per person nearly doubles.

Other complications in figuring the waste stream come from good news. Automobiles and appliances are now rare in landfills because they are recycled for their metal. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, steel “mini-mills” allowed more profitable recycling of such items because the mini-mills are less susceptible to “poisoning” by metals other than iron. Corrugated paper boxes (cardboard) would be a much larger percentage of the waste stream than they are, but retailers smash, bale, and return large numbers to the manufacturers.

There are other, much larger, waste streams than municipal waste, including manufacturing and sludges; agricultural wastes, such as corn cobs and manure; and mine tailings. However, municipal waste takes priority as far as recycling goes; one reason is that, if buried in landfills, some of these materials (paint, radioactive elements of smoke alarms, insecticide, nickel-cadmium batteries, and the mercury in fluorescent light tubes) create toxic problems in the future.

By 2018, roughly 69 million tons of the 292.4 million tons of MSW generated in the US was successfully recycled. Of this 69 million tons of recycled material, 66.5 percent consisted of paper products; 12.6 percent consisted of metals; 6 percent consisted of rubber, leather, and textiles; and 4.4 percent consisted of plastic. By contrast, the total MSW generated in the US for that year was 23 percent paper products; 5.8 percent textiles; 8.7 percent metals; and 12.2 percent plastic. The second largest contributing sector behind paper products was food waste at 21.5 percent.

Repurposing Waste

Recycling, or reusing materials for other purposes, reduces trash, energy use, and the consumption of resources. For example, aluminum cans that are melted and made into new cans do not go to a landfill; they require no aluminum and much less energy than smelting new aluminum. A society with a “total recycling” program could conceivably function with little mining of nonfuel minerals (assuming a neutral population growth).

Recycling increased greatly beginning in the 1970s, and governments have begun favoring recycled products over those made from virgin materials. In some European countries, manufacturers are held responsible for the eventual scrapping of their products, which results in designs favoring quick disassembly and recycling of standard materials.

Technological Innovations

Every waste stream is a potential resource stream. Many waste streams are already composed of liquids or small particles for easier processing. There are myriad technologies for recycling and great prospects for improvement, depending on the money and effort that a society is willing to expend.

Many companies have profited from the “industrial ecology” of using waste streams from one area as resource streams for another. For instance, the ashes from burning coal have always been available as a raw material for making cement, but pilot projects to repurpose the material were only started in the 1980s when environmental pressures increased. Likewise, manure can be spread back on fields or biologically digested to yield and concentrated fertilizer. The energy crisis of the 1970s and 1980s led to increased use of cogeneration, in which food-processing plants burn waste products such as corn cobs or shells from nuts for both useful heat and generation of electricity. Even asphalt and concrete can be ground up and reused.

Some of the most likely improvements to municipal waste recycling include automated sorting, electronic monitoring of the liquid trash in sewers, charging for eventual disposal, and use of materials on-site. Automated sorting lowers labor costs, allows sorting at any time, and allows a finer sorting. For instance, a manual trash “disassembly line” has stations for separating aluminum, iron, brass, all other metals, plastics, wood, and glass, but an automated facility can separate many types of plastics, metals, glass, and organic matter. Separating out nonorganic materials allows processing the remaining material into something usable and nontoxic. Piles of damp organic material naturally compost into soil through the action of bacteria. Hot diluted acid breaks the woody cellulose of organic materials into sugars that can be fermented into fuel alcohol.

Using materials on-site includes composting of yard wastes and kitchen scraps. Just as cities run composting operations, gardeners have composted for centuries to fertilize their gardens. Meanwhile, trash collection agencies are spared the collection and landfill costs of burying dirt. Another method of residential recycling is plumbing houses so that wastewater from showers and hand washing (“gray water”) can be recycled for watering ornamental plants.

Monitoring of sewers allows the use of an old recycling method, spreading processed sewage sludge on fields as fertilizer for nonfood crops. Unfortunately, sewage sludge can be easily tainted by industrial wastes, such as metal ions or solvents. These wastes could poison the soil indefinitely. Until the early 1990s there was no cost-effective way to monitor the sewers. Then cellular phones became widespread, and development began on computer-chip-sized sensors. Together these two technologies allow waste-management officals to monitor wastes in sewer lines in real time so that illegal wastes can be detected immediately.

The Economics of Recycling

Recycling saves material, and it often reduces energy consumption. However, collection and processing use energy and require labor as well as storage areas for the materials being recycled. Successful recycling must balance those profits and costs. Historically, recycling was feasible and widely practiced because labor was cheap and materials were expensive. Rag pickers collected old cloth for making paper. Polite wealthy diners left some food on their plates so that it could be donated. Communist China provides a modern example that shows the drawbacks of intensive recycling: During the period of revolutionary fervor that existed from the 1950s through the 1970s, one program involved returning and repairing light bulbs. Unfortunately, each worker in a light-bulb assembly factory averaged production of hundreds of bulbs per hour, while a repair technician only fixed several. Such labor-intensive recycling cannot compete in the modern world.

A second factor is that some materials favor recycling more than others. Glass containers are initially cheaper than aluminum ones, but glass is heavy (possessing low value per unit weight) to recycle back to collection points; moreover, tiny amounts of the wrong color ruin the color in remelted batches, and glass shards are dangerous. Meanwhile, the primary raw material for new glass is as common as sand on the beach.

Like aluminum, plastic has a high value in recycling because of light weight and great energy advantages. However, just as glass has many colors, plastics include many formulas. Mixing different kinds of plastics may degrade the performance of the recycled product. Worse, metals in inks on plastic containers may degrade performance or make the recycled plastic unsuitable for uses near food. Successful plastics recycling requires methods to sort or separate different kinds of plastics and, ideally, would include prohibitions against toxic inks.

Paper box beverage containers with just one-stop recycling have several advantages over both glass and aluminum. They are initially cheaper. They are lighter and pack more product in a given storage volume, saving energy in transportation and storage. Finally, they can be crushed into a renewable fuel roughly equivalent to brown coal in heating value. (Once again, this is a low unit value, applicable only with automated sorting to remove metals that would make the ash toxic.)

Solar panels emerged as a valuable avenue of recycling in the twenty-first century, and the EPA estimated that by 2030 there will be roughly $450 million to be made in the global recycling of solar panels—or the raw material equivalent of nearly 60 million new solar panels.

E-Waste

Electronic waste (or “e-waste”) has become an increasingly important part of the waste stream since the 1990s. These wastes include consumer electronics such as computers, their accessories (mice, monitors, keyboards), cell phones, and televisions. The toxic contents of some of the components of e-waste require that they be recycled properly, by experts in the proper disposal and repurposing of hazardous wastes. Some of the components can be reused. For example, cell phones and televisions can be donated to prolong their lives, and the materials (plastics, metals, glass) can be retrieved and reused. E-waste is the fastest growing segment in the MSW. Almost 49 million tons of e-waste was generated worldwide in 2018. On average, however, in the United States only a small percentage of these wastes are recycled annually, the rest finding its way to landfills. Even e-wastes that are conscientiously transported to hazardous waste centers can find their way to salvage yards, where their toxins can leak into groundwater. It is estimated that a large portion of e-waste resides in consumers’ closets and garages, where it sits while owners are deciding how to rid themselves of it. Although some enterprising individuals have started businesses based on recycling these wastes, the problem of mounting e-waste continues to grow.

Social and Political Aspects

Almost everyone wants some trash to be recycled, and as cheaply as possible. The first responses to the environmental movement were additions to labels that cost little (“Dispose of this container properly!”) and did not produce significant results. Until container deposit taxes were instituted, it was feared that North America would be buried under empty aluminum cans.

Likewise, other types of recycling can work only if there are financial incentives. These incentives might be like the “green dot” program in Europe, which holds manufacturers responsible for the ultimate disposal of the product. This program has led companies to design for eventual disassembly. The previously mentioned waste deposit taxes repay people for returning sorted items.

Trash taxes, rules, and limits on individuals have a limited value. If too harsh, they simply give people an incentive to rebel against them. Similarly, detailed sets of rules on how things should be done are probably counterproductive. Industrial ecology has worked better in Europe than in the United States because industry could simply be ordered to reduce wastes. In the United States, certain materials are categorized as toxic wastes and treated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (Public Law 94-580), one of the most complex sets of regulations ever devised. Recycling of many of these materials is forbidden, but the problem of how to reuse remains. For this reason, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Web site not only describes how to recycle or dispose of wastes but also urges conservation.

Only an estimated 14 percent of the world's plastic packaging is recycled. Eight million tons of plastic is estimated to end up in the world's oceans each year. Although recycling the remaining plastics could create $80 to $120 billion in revenue, the profitability remains low due to the high costs of breaking down the packaging or separating the components. For example, challenges exist in separating mixed-material packaging such as foil-lined juice boxes into useful components, or filtering out certain chemicals such as dyes that are added to polymer plastics. A number of innovative companies are developing technologies to address the problems on the molecular level using chemicals. Others are making investments into the mechanics of processing of these materials. In late 2016, the Carton Council of North America partnered with a robotics company and a recycling company to use robots at a recovery facility. The robot identifies different cartons and separates them for the recycling stream. Robotics are also used at the technology company Apple's recycling facilities where in 2016 Apple announced their Liam recycling robots had been developed to dismantle iPhones so the parts (including gold) could be reused. In other efforts, nonprofits such as the Recycling Partnership have been created to reward businesses for recycling initiatives. The Recycling Partnership, a US nonprofit, for example, recognizes commitments to create greener packaging with awards made to businesses.

In 2022, a report published by Greenpeace USA found that only 5 percent of plastic created in the US in 2021 was successfully recycled and that overall plastic recycling in the country had steadily decreased since a peak of 10 percent in 2014. The study attributed the low rates of recycling to both the lack of infrastructure and the overall high cost of repurposing plastics.

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