Despite good intentions, only half of plastic bottles in Britain and France are recycled. Creativity is needed to change habits
Government, industry and consumers in the developed world have known about the environmental and financial benefits of recycling for well over a generation. Yet it’s not something everyone does – despite knowing they should.
In fact, while three-quarters of British and French consumers say they always recycle plastic bottles at home, recycling rates in these countries still fall short, with only around half of all plastic bottles being returned for recycling. So why is it seemingly so difficult to recycle?
A six-month study, Unpacking the Household, conducted by Coca-Cola Enterprises and the University of Exeter and released in March, sought to uncover the different barriers that exist for people recycling in the home.
Despite the circular economy becoming a key phrase in the sustainability lexicon, it hasn’t filtered down to households. A key finding was that some people misunderstand what happens to waste once it leaves the home, not realizing that recycling is a circular – rather than linear – process. Meanwhile, people also perceive the recyclability of materials as a complex issue. And when in doubt, materials tend to be discarded rather than recycled.
The research suggests that recycling is often not a conscious decision but an instinctive routine built into our everyday lives – in other words, an unconscious habit. That isn’t the best recycling behavior, and although it isn’t always easy to break bad habits, the research pinpoints that new ones can be created at certain times when householders are most open to change, such as when they are designing a new kitchen or moving house.
Behavioral barriers differ by age and between generations but not gender. For example, children can make important contributions to household recycling rates. In the study, youngsters frequently recalled recycling information they had learnt and practiced at school and relayed it to their parents – helping identify opportunities to break habits and motivate adults to change their own behavior.
Source: TheGuardian.com Professional/Guardian Sustainable Business
Six days a week, about 20 hours a day, crowded streams of metal, paper, plastic and glass flow along conveyor belts at the recycling plant.
The bold yellow headline of a celebrity rumor rag shouts at you even from its spot squeezed amid a long, thick line of recyclables rolling in a single stream up a conveyor belt — the equivalent of three stories up into a huge warehouse near the Port of Tampa. The stream includes most household items that can be recycled, and — the bane of a modern recycling plant — quite a few things that can’t. Inside is a system of conveyor belts, about a mile of them, and heavy machinery that Rube Goldberg might have designed.Here, the crowded stream of metal, paper, plastic and glass from Charlotte County — as well as Pinellas, Sumter, Polk, Sarasota and Hillsborough counties, and the city of Tampa — are separated, sorted, cleaned of contaminates and pressed into one-ton-plus bales. Workers are stationed at “quality control” checkpoints throughout the warehouse, which is run by Waste Management, a solid waste and recycling behemoth that holds a contract with Charlotte and numerous other government and private entities in the United States. Its fleet of trucks picks up recyclables once a week from residents in unincorporated Charlotte, each day in different sections of the county, about 84,000 homes in all.Besides reducing carbon emissions and preserving natural resources for the future, recycling reduces the material constantly filling Charlotte’s landfill, which is projected to last through 2034. But that projection doesn’t take into account a recent spike in the number of residents who participate in the recycling program, which officials said was due to the current method of so-called “single-stream” recycling, which began here in 2010, along with larger new bins it rolled out last November.Workers at the Tampa MRF sort out contaminants like plastic bags, hoses or large metal pieces. EVAN WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLYEverything that gets recycled helps extend the landfill’s life as the county’s population grows. A University of Floridastudy shows it growing from its current population of 163,000 to more than 190,000 by 2030.What is not recycled is buried in the landfill, and no one relishes the prospect of building a new one, least of all potential nearby residents. It’s also expensive, at around $500,000 to $700,000 an acre to build, said Richard Allen, the county’s solid waste operations manager.
Recycling the unit can have the impact of taking two cars off the road for a year. By ensuring your old unit is safely and responsibly recycled, you save it from rusting away in a landfill and instead re-purpose the materials back into the manufacturing stream.
“Old refrigerators and freezers can use up to three times the energy of newer models and are often expensive to run,” said Tamara Sondgeroth, Focus on Energy’s Director of Operations. “These older devices can be big contributors to household energy costs because of their inefficiency.”
While nearby cities including Winter Park struggle to improve recycling up to state standards, Oviedo and Winter Springs continue to lead the way in the push toward lofty statewide goals for recycling and sustainability.
New 96-gallon recycling carts were distributed to Oviedo residents last December, replacing the previous 18-gallon bins at homes at no additional charge.
The All-In-One cart system allows residents to recycle paper, plastic, cardboard, aluminum, metal canisters and glass all from one container.
But that doesn’t mean everything made from metal or plastic can be tossed in the bins; Items that can’t be recycled yet commonly end up in the bins include aerosol cans, aluminum foil, batteries, light bulbs and Styrofoam.
Residents in apartments and condominiums have their own options too. Anyone without curbside recycling can drop off recyclables in bins behind Oviedo City Hall, located at 400 Alexandria Blvd.
Oviedo leads the way for reusing trash in Seminole County, recycling 35 percent of its waste each year, according to figures reported in 2012.
In 2008 the state set a goal of recycling 75 percent of its waste by 2020. No Central Florida cities have reported hitting that number yet.
Oviedo accounted for more than 25 percent of all recycling in Seminole County last year, Mayor Dominic Persampiere said.
HOLMES COUNTY New figures from the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation show recycling rates are up statewide. Some areas are doing a better job than others. Holmes county officials say re-educating consumers is a vital part of the process.
Floridians seem to be taking better care of the environment. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection says recycling statewide is up one percent from last year, when the state recycled 11.8 million tons of trash.
In 2012, that amount was just 9.7 million tons.
“I think it’s wonderful that maybe we’re getting more people involved in recycling,” said Holmes County Recycling Center Coordinator Ann Payne. “The more people that will recycle, the better for all of us in the future. Our children, grandchildren.”
Monday officials at the Holmes County Recycling Center were processing more than 100 tons of cardboard.
The center receives everything from cardboard and plastic to old T.V’s and tires. It’s a lot of junk, but Payne wishes there was more.
Many items that come to the recycling center such as paper and plastic are from the public, but Payne says many people still use hazardous ways to get rid of their trash.
“We’re so rural that people in the past have either, burned any kind of cardboard and paper type products. Landfill, or a lot of people use to just dig holes in the area and bury their trash. The fire of course, with the dry areas we’ve had and all the problems, we could get the wildfires. Also, burying things, it can leech down into our water aquifer and contaminate water,” she explained.
Last year the center took in more than 277 tons of cardboard and more than 65 tons of tires.
Payne says the county plans to use advertising and summer programs to make people even more aware of recycling efforts.
Holmes County was ranked 25 out of 45 counties, with a 28% recycling rate.
CHANNEL 7 WJHG.com Updated: Mon 11:00 PM, Jul 07, 2014
By: Brian Hill
By Yvette C. Hammett | Tribune Staff
Published: March 2, 2014
TAMPA — Those hulking blue bins taking up significant space in local garages and side yards are getting a lot more use than Hillsborough County officials predicted.
Since switching to the new automated waste management and recycling program four months ago, the number of households participating in unincorporated Hillsborough’s recycling program has doubled — from 33 percent to nearly 67 percent — said Solid Waste Manager Kim Byer. And the amount of aluminum, cardboard, glass, steel and paper being collected has increased by 90 percent.
Solid waste officials are thrilled with the initial results, and are cautiously optimistic that participation will remain high. “If you take the straight math of it, the first four months of a new program doesn’t show how it will be forever, but we are seeing a very positive trend,” said John Lyons, the county’s public works director.
“Single-stream” recycling collection — putting everything in one bin — is fairly new, but is a nationwide trend, said Ron Henricks, a waste reduction administrator with Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection. “Ten years ago nobody was doing it.” Now, he said, about half of Florida’s nearly 20 million people are served by such programs.
By allowing consumers to put all recyclables in one curb-side cart — instead of separating the items — they tend to find it easier and more acceptable, Henricks said.
Hillsborough County is third, statewide — behind Martin and Lee counties — in the percentage of waste it is recycling, Henricks said. As a whole, he said, Florida is recycling 48 percent of its waste. And according to the Environmental Protection Agency, 34 percent of waste generated nationally was being recycled in one way or another as of 2009.
Last year, before Hillsborough initiated its automated program, haulers reported collecting about 32,000 tons of recyclables, Lyons said. The county now is on target to collect 60,000 tons of materials in this first year of the new program.
Byer, the Solid Waste manager, said her department will study which neighborhoods are doing a good job recycling and which ones might need more education. The county’s new recycling bins are equipped with computer chips so that every time one tips into a recycling truck, a record is made. “Once we get our arms around that data, we will be able to figure out which neighborhoods to gear that outreach toward,” Byer said.
Since launching the new program, the county has taken in $1.38 million from selling recyclables. Previously, county waste haulers owned the recyclables they collected. Now, Progressive Waste Solutions, the county’s processor, receives an average of $120 per ton for recyclables, keeps $50 of that for processing and gives the county nearly 97 percent of the remaining $70, Lyons said. That money will be used to keep collection fees down, he said.
Mike Biddle: Why plastic is still ‘the last frontier’ of recycling
The former CEO discusses his frustration with the recycling movement, his hatred of waste and how the US can grow jobs
Source: The Guardian
Written by: Marc Gunther
www.theguardian.com
Wednesday 26 February 2014
Mike Biddle has stepped down as MBA Polymers CEO. Photograph: MBA Polymers MBA Polymers /Guardian
This month, Mike Biddle, the founder and longtime CEO of a pioneering plastics-recycling company called MBA Polymers, stepped down as an executive at the firm, ending more than two decades of unrelenting effort to reduce plastic waste.
Biddle’s story is one of great success, as well as ongoing frustration. He sat down with me last week at the 2014 GreenBiz Forum in Phoenix to talk about MBA Polymers, the potential of the so-called circular economy, and why, despite all we know, the vast majority of plastics discarded in the US still wind up in incinerators, landfills or, worse, the ocean.
Plastics, he says, remains “the last frontier of recycling.”
Biddle, who is 58 and has a PhD in chemical engineering from Case Western and an MBA from Stanford, left a good job at Dow Chemical in 1992 in the hope of solving the difficult puzzle of plastics recycling. During the next seven years, he attracted about $7m in grants and loans from the state of California, the Environmental Protection Agency and a plastics industry trade group.
The money enabled him to develop a set of technologies needed to make high-quality plastic pellets – which can be used to make new products – from big, messy and mixed post-consumer waste streams, particularly electronic waste and junked automobiles. He calls it “above-ground mining.” (MBA Polymers doesn’t bother with PET plastics, the type used to make soda bottles, leaving that particular waste stream to the beverage industry.)
MBA Polymers turns hard-to-recycle post-consumer plastics – such as those found in electronic waste and junked automobiles – into high-quality pellets like these, which are, in turn, used to make new products. Photograph: MBA Polymers
Since raising its first round of venture capital in 1999, MBA Polymers has attracted more than $150m from investors. Its latest round was a Series H. Now, the company, headquartered in Richmond, California, operates recycling plants in China, Austria and in the former coal-mining town of Worksop in the UK, which together process more than 300m pounds of plastic waste per year. It also won a 2013 Katerva Award for the materials and resources category, announced today.
The company has proven that the economics of plastics recycling can work, so long as there is an adequate supply of waste to be reprocessed. And closing the loop on plastics also delivers big environmental benefits. Recycling plastics not only keeps waste out of landfills and oceans, but also reduces the need for petroleum-based feedstocks, requires 80% less energy than making plastic from oil and dramatically reduces carbon emissions.
Of all this, Biddle is justly proud. He considers himself an environmentalist, as well as an entrepreneur. “I absolutely hate waste,” he says.
But Biddle is disappointed that he has been unable to take the company further. He estimates that as much as 500bn pounds of plastics are thrown away every year, only a tiny fraction of which is captured by MBA Polymers.
He’s especially frustrated that the company isn’t operating in the US, the country that educated him and provided the seed money for his research. MBA Polymers employs about 300 people, and all but a handful of engineers work overseas. “I’d like to create jobs here,” he says. Biddle himself had been commuting to the UK.
Why can’t the company gain traction in the US? Building plants to reprocess plastics is expensive, and MBA Polymers cannot be sure it will get a large enough – and secure enough – supply of US plastic waste to justify the capital cost.
One way to secure a more predictable supply of e-waste would be to place some of the burden of collecting it on manufacturers. That’s what the EU has done. Its “extended producer responsibility” laws, which require electronics to be collected and recycled, have created a robust collection system for used cell phones, tablets, computers and other e-waste. “They primed the pump with policy,” Biddle says.
Besides that, Biddle would like to see the US follow other countries and require that e-waste exports to poor countries be handled responsibly. MBA Polymers cannot compete, he says, with cheap and irresponsible recyclers in places like China, Vietnam and West Africa.
“People, for as little as a dollar a day, dig through our stuff and extract what they can and leave behind what they can’t, which is mostly the plastics,” he says. “A lot of that winds up in rivers and oceans. … We need care about how we unmake our stuff as much as we do about it’s made.”
US recyclers, he says, could be required to audit the processing of the waste that they export. Today, “there’s no downstream accountability,” he says.
Biddle has testified in favor the regulation of e-waste exports before Congress. The stance didn’t come easily to him because, he told me, he’s believes in limited government and free markets. “But I can’t compete if the rules aren’t fair,” he says.
MBA Polymers may get a big assist from China, which last year announced a crackdown on hazardous waste imports called Operation Green Fence. “They’re trying clamp down as they should,” Biddle says, “but enforcement is not what it should be.”
Biddle isn’t giving up. Even though he has left MBA Polymers, he expects to keep working on recycling policy – despite his libertarian instincts. He plans to encourage businesses with access to waste streams, such as auto shredders, to recognize their value. And he has taken on a new job as president of Waste Free Oceans America, a new subsidiary of a global non-profit called Waste Free Oceans.
MBA Polymers turns hard-to-recycle post-consumer plastics – such as those found in electronic waste and junked automobiles – into high-quality pellets like these, which are, in turn, used to make new products. Photograph: MBA Polymers MBA Polymers
We’ve all heard it, many of us even practice this mantra. But did you know that these three words are a part of a well thought out waste disposal hierarchy?
Most effective
Reducing is by far the most effective way to cut waste, and therefore it is at the top of the hierarchy. If you reduce the amount of what you consume, you help conserve precious resources and limit the waste you create.
That means doing more with less and putting real thought into what you need versus what you want. Start with something simple like walking to work or school instead of driving or installing an inexpensive water displacement system in your toilets to reduce water usage.
Reuse is pretty self-explanatory. Before you recycle, think about how you can use an item over again, or perhaps several times — think water bottles, plastic food containers, etc. The more we can reuse items, or purchase items meant to be reused like cloth grocery bags and rechargeable batteries, the less reprocessing of these materials will need to occur.
There is also the notion of re-purposing to consider as well. While reusing means to use an item over again in its original form, re-purposing takes an item used for one purpose and uses it another way like turning a pickle jar into a vase for flowers, for example.
Then comes recycling
Recycling takes time and energy to process materials, which is why it’s not at the top of the hierarchy. But that is not to say that recycling isn’t good. So keep filling up those bins you have at home and at work.
If you have an item that had been truly used and needs to be disposed of, find out if it can be recycled. Remember recycling also means buying products that are made from recycled materials, using them to their fullest extent and then returning them to be recycled again.
And the hierarchy goes even deeper.
If you really want to help conserve our natural resources, consider other steps in the hierarchy like composting. Composting is Nature’s way of recycling.
At the bottom of the list are additional steps including waste-to-energy and land disposal, however those steps are usually conducted by a municipality or county.
Written by Mark Walter Business Development Manager
Rare earth metals are important components in green energy products such as wind turbines and eco-cars. But the scarcity of these metals is worrying the EU.
The demand for metals such as neodymium (Nd) and dysprosium (Dy) is increasing much faster than production. These metals are used in technologies such as the generators that store power in wind turbines, and the electric motors that propel electric and hybrid cars. But they are also used in everyday products like computers and mobile phones.
Rare earth metals do occur in the earth’s crust, but not in sufficiently high concentrations. This is why only one country – China – has so far been supplying the entire world with these elements. However, in recent years, China has begun to restrict its export of these materials.
Forecasts show that as early as next year, these metals will be hard to come by.
Clean Material
This explains why the recycling of rare earth metals from scrap is fast becoming an important research topic. Seven major European research institutes (Fraunhofer, CEA, TNO, VTT, SINTEF, Tecnalia and SP) have joined forces to invest in a joint programme (Value from Waste) aimed at tackling this important issue.
“The aim is to extract valuable materials from the waste streams. The challenges lie in the fact that the material must be sufficiently clean in order to be recycled, and we have to be sure that it is not contaminated by other harmful materials”, explains Odd Løvhaugen of SINTEF ICT.
Researchers are therefore focusing much of their work on finding out which products could contain pollutants, which methods are best for analysing and measuring the content of the polluted materials, and when such products can be expected to be found in waste.
They are also evaluating extraction methods, techniques to recycle nanoparticles in the treatment process, and how the constituents of ash can be analysed after incineration.
Technology from the aluminium and smelting industry
SINTEF is coordinating this major EU programme, which is using two groups of material technologies in the race to find good analytical and extraction methods. The approach chosen by the researchers involves a technology well-known from the aluminium and smelting industry.
In the search for sources of recycling material, many people have been considering permanent magnets. This is the most significant product to contain rare earth metals – measured both in terms of value and volume.
Discarded magnets
On the basis of tests, SINTEF researchers believe that the electrolysis technology used in aluminium plants can be used to recycle magnetic alloys from discarded magnets and scrap material from magnet manufacturers. It will take some time before there are enough scrap eco-cars to be able to recycle their motors, which is why they are turning to the magnet manufacturers for the magnetic alloys.
However, the process is still slow, and there is a lot of work still to be done before the researchers will know whether they will be able to achieve their goal. If they are successful, they will have found a method that is much simpler than alternative processes based on the use of strong acids.
Solutions needed
Several other problems must also be solved for the stages before the electrolysis process. Among other things, we need collection and disassembly methods for used magnets, and the magnets themselves must also be demagnetised locally, since the long-distance transport of intact permanent magnets is prohibited.
“Other challenges include finding methods that can identify and characterise nanoparticles in gases, water and solid materials”, says Odd Løvhaugen. “And we must create a toolbox of methods to evaluate the behaviour of nanoparticles in waste treatment processes”.
Submitted Feb 18, 2014 http://phys.org/news/2014-02-urgent-recycle-rare-metals.html
Written By Tim Freed: July 11, 2014
