China No Longer Takes Our Recycling
Like many people, you probably dutifully placed your plastics, cans, glassware and paper in your recycling bin, placed it at curbside each week where a recycling truck picked it up. Most likely, you didn’t give it much thought after that, believing that you had done your part to help the environment.
For two decades, China took the world’s recyclables, processing them for use in its flourishing manufacturing and infrastructure as it was cheaper to recycle materials because of cheap labor there than manufacture from scratch. Late in 2017, China announced that it would no longer be the world’s waste bin as it decided to ban 24 different types of recyclables from foreign countries starting in 2018.
World Thrown Into a Recycling Crisis
The result is that the remainder of the world has been thrown into a recycling crisis. In 206, China recycled half of the planet’s plastic, paper and metals, with the United State exported 16 million tons of its waste there during the same year. Even a small country like Ireland sent 95 percent of its recyclables there. Recyclables are going into, you guessed it, landfills, instead of being processed and turned into something new. However, there could be a silver lining if change our mindset on how recyclables can be used.
Turning Waste Into Clean Energy
One viable solution is to turn recycled plastics into energy. Plastics pose the biggest problem when it comes to recycling because rigid plastics can only be recycled a handful of times before they lose their original properties and become unrecyclable. Think of what plastic is made, namely refined crude oil, itself a source of energy. By switching from mechanical recycling of plastics to chemical recycling processes such as gasification and pyrolysis, energy may be produced.
Through gasification, an industrial mixture called syngas is produced, which can be made to produce diesel or petrol gas, or it can be burned directly in appliances such as boilers to generate electricity. Pyrolysis produces a mixture of oil similar to crude oil that can be refined into transportation fuels. The fuels produced through this process leave a smaller carbon footprint than traditional fossil fuels.
Opportunity is at Hand
Plastic isn’t the only recyclable material that can be used to produce energy. A New York State-based company named ReEnergy Holdings LLC has taken woody biomass and other wood-based residues such as paper to produce renewable energy. ReEnergy also has facilities that recycle construction and demolition material. Biomass power can prevent more than 30 million tons or annual organic waste from entering landfills and release methane gas into the atmosphere.
Sweden Can Do It, Why Not Everyone Else?
The Swedes recycle over 99 percent of their household waste. We’re not talking about simply putting waste in a recycling bin, rather, that waste is turned into something. Swedes separate newspapers, metal, plastic, glass, light bulbs, batteries and more, including food waste. All of it is reused in some way or composted. The United States can do this too with a different mindset.
