Recycling Technology

Summary

The environmental movement, which has been growing steadily since the 1940s, has brought increasing attention to the need to change the public and industrial practices that have enormous environmental costs. Managing the vast amounts of waste produced in a consumer society is a prodigious challenge that is exacerbated by the closing and non-replacement of landfill-waste dump sites. One important aspect of the green attitude is to reduce the level of consumption of virgin planetary resources by reusing and recycling products. While citizens are being called upon to reduce, reuse, and recycle, it is generally recognized that efficient recycling requires the application of new technologies. The major targets for residential recycling programs, which now exist in most cities of the developed world, have traditionally been glass and aluminum containers, paper products, certain types of plastics, and plant and yard waste. However, as technologies are further developed and industries find profitable ways of recycling and reusing waste, recycling programs are being extended to include rubber, a variety of metals, asphalt shingles, and electronics.

Definition and Basic Principles

Recycling is the process of returning previously manufactured products to a raw material state to be utilized afresh for the manufacture of new products. The purpose of recycling technologies is to discover new ways to extend this practice into new material fields. In keeping with the mantra of the global environmental movement—reduce, reuse, recycle—recycling is a crucial aspect of the global environmental justice movement because recycling reduces pollution by reducing the amount of landfill waste and the amount of waste destroyed in incinerators, both of which add to greenhouse gases. Recycling conserves natural resources, which would otherwise be relied upon for the manufacture of new products. Recycling also reduces pollution by reducing manufacturing energy consumption, since less energy is required to recycle a product than to make a new one from virgin materials.

Background and History

The creation of industries focused on reusing previously manufactured products grew out of an increasing awareness of the effects of industrialization and urbanization on the planet's atmosphere, waters, and land. The launch of the global environmental justice movement is credited to Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist and conservationist whose book Silent Spring (1962) stimulated public awareness of the effects of unrestricted pesticide use in the United States.

People have always reused their possessions, finding new ways to put old things to fresh uses. However, reuse of products had been waning in affluent societies, since the notion of “planned obsolescence” rendered voracious consumption a virtue. The idea was first introduced by New York real estate broker Bernard London and promoted in his 1932 paper, “Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence.” London argued that science and business were successfully producing products in factories and fields; inadequate consumption practices were to blame for the economic woes of the country. Consumers were not buying enough, but London had the answer: Products must be designed to serve only a specific, limited life span. Increased consumption offered the preventative against future economic depressions. Against the traditional Protestant ethic of extreme frugality, London posited that an insatiable appetite for goods was the mark of the good citizen, acting in support of the nation's economic health.

During World War II, Americans had experimented with conservation and recycling as a function of national security. However, in the economic boom following the war, Western middle-class life unapologetically adopted an ethos of consumption, where product value was directly tied to newness and abundance. As environmental problems grew, in the United States and across the planet, the environmental justice movement gained increasing credence among middle-class Americans, and the wastefulness of modern consumer societies became increasingly obvious, intolerable, and shameful to more and more citizens. Across the industrialized West, people began to call upon their governments for regulation of polluting industries, and they began to integrate more sound practices into their private lives. The cultural and social impact of the new public awareness culminated in the establishment of Earth Day in 1970.

Recycling is an important aspect of the modern environmental movement, but in the light of the vast environmental damage done by industry all over the planet, recycling can be undervalued by some environmental activists as having little actual environmental impact. However, one crucial caveat of the environmental justice movement has been to encourage consumers to do their part and institute small lifestyle changes as their personal contribution to the health of the planet. A minor shift in general human consumption behavior, in the context of a globalizing consumerism, suggests that significant benefits can be reaped by reducing, reusing, and recycling old products. The change in public attitudes has forced environmental concerns to the forefront of political debate and contributed to a new ethic that values restraint in consuming. Recycling is a crucial aspect of the new ecological awareness. Recycling has become the fashion, and industry has responded to the new attitudes, finding new applications for the new ethic and creating new business opportunities for profit and development.

How It Works

When people and communities recycle, used materials are set aside in recycling bins, collected, and converted into new products. Simple societies have always been avid recyclers, since their access to new products is limited compared with consumer societies. They tend to produce very little waste and place a high premium on the human creativity that reuses old products for new tasks and designs new products from old discards. Most cities in the developed world support the reduce, reuse, and recycle ethic by collecting used products as part of their curbside trash-collection services. The materials may be sorted as they are placed on the recycling trucks, or once collected, they may be sorted in substations, where the used products and materials are then sold to dedicated recycling companies to be made into newly valuable commodities for sale in the global marketplace. Some recycling programs ask residents to separate their recyclables from their trash, which may be collected on different days. To encourage recycling, many Canadian communities have the policy of charging residents for the trash put out for collection but not for their recycling. Residents may be asked to sort and separately bind their recycling into various types of materials—paper products, plastics, glass, Styrofoam, corrugated cardboard, and boxes.

Applications and Products

Most recycling programs target for collection previously used household items that are made from paper, cardboard, metal, glass, plastic, and compostable yard wastes. Recycling recovered metals and glass involves a relatively simple procedure: The items are melted down and sold to processing plants that refill the newly formed containers or to manufacturing plants that create new products from the raw materials. Yard waste can be composted with very little investment in equipment, and many families have created their own composting systems. Paper is the most important recycled material, because recycling is simple and saves harvesting new trees. Paper is recycled by mixing with water, and if necessary, de-inking the pulp before reusing it. Plastics recycling, on the other hand, entails an expensive process, whereby differing resins are separated. Since plastics are made from the Earth's dwindling stores of petroleum, they are a favorite target of recycling programs, despite the more complicated processes involved. Plastics can be recycled into a wide range of secondary products, from textiles, such as fiberfill and polyester-like fibers, to plastic toys, recycling bins, and plastic furniture. Recycling of electronic- or e-waste began in the late twentieth century. Prior to that, television sets, computer monitors, computers and laptops, printers, and microwave ovens were disposed of in landfill sites, where they presented a number of health and safety risks, because of the dangerous materials they contain (barium, beryllium, flame retardants, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, lead, mercury, plastics). Moreover, the precious metals used in electronic boards are rare, and thus highly coveted, in their natural state. New industries have cropped up to salvage useful and valuable materials from these sources.

Ecosystem and Wildlife Protection. Recycling protects the ecosystem and wildlife by reducing pollution to forests, rivers, etc.

Economy. Recycling helps to increase employment, business expansion, tax revenues, and overall economic development.

Extraction of Metals. Recycling by bioleaching with the help of bacteria helps in recovering metals such as copper, gold, cobalt, zinc, or nickel from e-waste.

Plasma Gasification. Recycling incinerator ash or chemicals using highly ionized or electrically charged gases called plasma helps generate clean energy. Solid or liquid wastes are converted into a synthetic gas called syngas, which can be further refined to run turbines, fuel cells, and vehicles.

Careers and Course Work

On the theoretical side, undergraduate and graduate degrees are offered in the fields of sustainability and environmental studies, which grants students the opportunity to grasp the fundamental scientific concepts that underpin sustainability, understand the policy framework and the political environments in which environmental policy is enacted, create new economic motivations for developing sustainable practices, and analyze and evaluate the consequences of adopting the new technologies. Environmental ethics is a popular course offered in many philosophy departments, business schools, earth science programs, and science and technology studies departments. On the practical side, recycling technologies is an aspect of engineering, with varied applications in mechanical, electrical, civil, and systems engineering. Courses in design and materials science look to the creation of new recycling methods and new materials to be targeted for recycling, while civil engineering addresses problems of landfill elimination, road surface recycling, and asphalt shingle recycling. Courses include waste management, geography, chemistry, and environmental engineering. Aspirants can work as alloy sorters, sustainability managers, compliance specialists, recycling specialists, and energy specialists.

Social Context and Future Prospects

Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, public attitudes in industrialized nations attached virtue to consumption, believing heavy consuming would stimulate the economy and guard societies against economic depressions. Western middle-class life began to locate its identity in products. Through the phenomenon of branding, companies capitalized on this identifying tendency, and advertising convinced consumers that newer, bigger, and more plentiful was better. However, as environmental problems grew more and more evident, in the United States and across the planet, the environmental justice movement gained increasing authority among middle-class Americans, and the wastefulness of modern consumer societies came to be seen as deplorable, irresponsible, and shameful. Across the industrialized West, people began to call upon their governments for regulation of polluting industries, and they began to integrate more sound practices into their private lives. The cultural and social impact of the new public awareness led to the creation of recycling programs in many communities.

Recycling is an important aspect of the modern environmental justice movement. The planet is one component of the triple bottom line (planet, people, and profit), which is a cornerstone of global ethics and the corporate social responsibility movement. In the light of the vast environmental damage still being done by industry all over the planet, recycling is sometimes undervalued by environmental activists, who feel that the biggest offenders are actually governments that need to regulate polluting practices and industries that need to implement environmentally sound manufacturing methods. There is good reason to agree with this activist charge. However, since overconsumption and consumer wastefulness are enormous aspects of the environmental problem, the claim that recycling fails to target the biggest culprits is hardly helpful in changing the public's attitude about its extravagant lifestyle, which is fast being exported to the developing world. Recycling, as a lifestyle ethos, can and has begun to spill out into the business world, stimulating new recycling industries at every level of public life. It is precisely this change in public attitudes that has forced environmental concerns to the forefront of political debate and contributed to public policy changes in favor of industrial pollutant regulation and recycling in the public realm. Recycling programs in the ten U.S. states and one territory in which deposit legislation incentivizes bottle-return practices have been successful. Recycling is a crucial aspect of the ecological justice movement. Scientists and other experts agree that the future of recycling technologies consists in placing more of various recycling technology sites around the country and throughout the world. The process of developing new recycling technologies may move very quickly because many scientists and business leaders have gotten onboard.

However, the biggest boost to recycling technologies comes when governments get on board, and politicians raise recycling as an issue of importance, which then draws to the subject both media coverage and research funding. The United States, traditionally a slow participant in global ecological concerns, has been exploring the possible recycling of commercial nuclear waste, as a potential fuel product. Dangerous materials, such as plutonium, require enhanced security in transporting to, and managing in, recycling plants, but these matters remain under investigation as recycling technologies spread into broader arenas of application. In the United States, a deep geological waste repository was in operation for the disposal of transuranic waste, including plutonium, in the early twenty-first century. China, the world's largest recyclable processer, stopped importing recyclable materials from August 2017, which affected the United States' recycling rates in 2017. In November 2018, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and forty-five other organizations signed the America Recycles Pledge to work together to address the challenges related to the recycling system. In 2020, EPA announced a plan to increase the recycling rate to 50 percent by 2030. The British government also announced a target of recycling 65 percent of municipal waste by 2035.

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