First, get over the idea that recycling is a zero sum game. That you can make money on the end product of recycling. It is a waste management issue and requires resources. We pay to landfill and haul it away, if we are serious about recycling and we should be, land-filling that which should be recycled is not good waste management.
This isn't that hard if we are serious.. (of course we really aren't)
Metals, all metals are easy. Aluminum, pot metal, steel and copper are easy to recycle.. you just have to capture, separate and melt down.
Glass is easy. Separate it by color. Brown, Green, Blue, Clear and other (red and a few others). Grind them to about 1" pieces. Not fine grind, but small enough to be able later to load with a skid loader. Pile the glass into stockpiles. Let the piles "Rot". In two years or so this will happen. As the glass sits under the sun, rain and heat any residue will disappear. Paper labels and such will rot awry. At the end of this the glass is ready to be reused in creating new bottles. No washing out is required. The colored glass is the most valuable. Recycled glass melt faster and at a lower temperature that making it from sand. The cost of cleaning the glass is offset by stockpiling.
Rubber is useful in powering equipment that makes concrete.
Wood ground up is easy to process for many purposes.
This leaves the big bugaboo. What do we do with plastic waste? Plastic melts without burning at a controlled temperature. There is no need to separate the plastic. I can be bulk melted. Then the resultant clumps ground into large pieces. Plastic can be pyrolized into oil products. The reason to melt and grind it is to insure the automation of the pyrolosis process. We have the natural gas in abundance to do the pyrolitic process. The ground melted plastic can be stockpiled until moved to a pyrolosis plant. There is also the use of the melted plastic to create products like plastic fence, plastic planks etc.
None of this is impossible, it just won't cash flow. Let's not pretend that it will. Time to take action.
1 comment:
Collecting copper is where it at if have do collecting.
My friend bobby was homeless and depressed so i taught him how to can oneday to get him going doing something. Well he got real good at it. Was making some money for himself to help....well now he has a job cleaning up homeless camps for the city paid job, they were hiring homeless people. So onestep at a time. I can say collecting cans got him out of those depressions. Did God use the cans? He did.
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