Materials
Consumerium's information on materials, their production, use and recycling.
Materials consist of one or more w:chemical elements. 118 different elements have been identified, of which 94 occur naturally on earth.
Materials have many properties which effect which material is most suitable for which use.
Biodegradable waste
w:Biodegradable waste includes w:food waste and w:agricultural waste.
Recycling biodegradable waste
There are various ways in which biodegradable waste can be recycled
- w:Composting yields viable w:humus
- w:Anaerobic digestion yields w:biofuel
- w:Incineration yields energy
Running an private biodegradable waste recycling facility or compost as it's called you might have noticed some things like citrus fruit peels compost quite slowly compared to say some other fruit leftovers.
In centralized biodegradable waste management this might not be such an big issue due to the longer time horizon of the activity. Drying biodegradable waste before you put it into the recycling bin helps you avoid fungus growth allowing you to take it out less frequently and also makes the job of the collector nicer
Carton and cardboard
w:Carton and w:cardboard are often made from recycled paper and can be recycled again to some extent to make more cardboard.
Glass
w:Glass constitutes mostly of w:Silicon dioxide.
Recycling glass
Effective recycling of glass (mostly bottles currently) relies on a refund system where a small refund is paid for the return of the package to the producer for reuse after it has been cleaned and checked to be in a functional condition.
Also recycling glass containers without using them again is useful though if the glass is broken and crushed in the process to just create more raw material. Though this consues much more energy as the glass is melted once again
Metals
Recycling metals
Again here there are many resolution levels. Not knowing about the technology in this area I'm not very equipped to write anything about this. Different metals have different prices and different raw material extraction costs so that could be used as guideline.
Open questions:
- How does plastic, rubber or paper that is attached to some metal surface affect the usability of the metal?
Paper
Paper is made from w:pulp that can be made from trees or recycled paper.
Recycling paper
There are many different classes of papers in high resolution recycling. Office paper (print outs) are different from magazine papers and so on. This further separation of paper into different bins is done somewhere and somewhere it's not, but we should work to make it more available as all recycling
- Small metals such as magazine or tabloid binders are not a big problem since they can be detected and removed by machines in the processing.
- Plastic and glues from envelopes are more of a problem in the recycling process. Someone with more knowledge on this could helpfully write something here.
Plastics
Plastics are made from oil or recycled plastic.
Recycling plastics
- Many types of plastic can be recycled to make plastic.
Links to information about recycling plastics
See also
- Energy
- Material input per service unit can be used to measure eco-efficiency