Recycling 4: Now what?

After living, breathing, writing and researching post-consumer recycling, I have taken a break from thinking about it. However, I continue to catch myself reminding people which recycling bin to use, or to not throw a recyclable product in the garbage. I am still a compliant recycling citizen, but I am also an educated citizen who has asked questions about what happens post-curbside.


But, like one of the recyclers asked me: "what does this have to do with an Architecture Masters?"


Good question, sir. 

The goal was to use the small-scale process of post-consumer recycling to create a procedure for analysis of recycling processes in general. I would then adapt this procedure to analyze the recycling and reuse of building components. With this analysis in hand, I planned to format it in such a way that the public could understand it, and set it free.


It was a decent plan. Unfortunately, the "small-scale" process turned into an enormous undertaking with a number of unanswered questions. Parts are still useful tools which I can use later to apply to structural steel. The greatest success, however, was that I now have more realistic expectations of accumulating research within the industrial realm.


So where do you go from here?

If you have the willpower, read the essay "Recycling 3: Resource Accounting" or at least scan through it and look at the images. If you have even more interest, check out some of the references at the bottom. Most of all, share what you learn. Be vigilant in your recycling of glass, steel, and aluminum. Use less Styrofoam. Limit your plastic use, since only some of it can be reused for equivalent products after recycling. 


Where am I going from here?


With a renewed interest in the outgoing stream of our consumption-driven lives, I may engage in even further investigation into post-consumer recycling. Even more likely, however, is that I will take my research to the larger scale of buildings. 

There are many different materials in any given building. What do we do when a building no longer meets our needs? Do we renovate it? Put an addition on it? Or tear it down and start from scratch? What is the destination of the outgoing materials? Where did the incoming materials come from? There is the potential for a closed-loop system if we put in the time and effort. That's what I'll head towards.

"Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble."
I found this image of an Electric Arc Furnace and couldn't help but post it. Perhaps the recycling of steel is just a modern form of witchcraft performed over a cauldron. 

Recycling 3: Resource Accounting

     Accounting is a matter of keeping track of incoming and outgoing money.  Good accounting is understanding how to minimize expenses and maximize income.  The person who best understands accounting would be better off financially than the person who does not understand it at all.  We can agree to these principles using money, so why are we not using these principles in the realm of more valuable objects:  our earthly resources.

    Over the last 100 years, North Americans have seen milk bottle reuse, soda bottle returns, beer can deposits, community recycling centres, and curbside mixed-stream recycling.  The value of materials has fluctuated greatly over that time due to two World Wars, the Cold War, the Space Race, the Vietnam War, and the 1973 Oil Crisis. Resources were reserved or collected nationwide to provide for war efforts.  Individuals hoarded resources and goods out of fear of a worldwide shortage.  It appears that it takes a crisis for us to recognize the value of our resources.

    In the last fifty years, however, resource awareness has not always been driven by crisis.  While the refund for a bottle or can was a small amount for middle-class Americans, poverty-stricken citizens used bottle-returns as a source of income.  In the 1960s, the collection of glass, steel, and aluminum containers for a small refund was incentive enough to start community collection centres run by political activists and ecologically minded individuals.  These small-scale organizations functioned for over twenty years before the rest of America realized the crisis.

    In 1987, the Mobro 4000 garbage barge from New York City travelled over 6000 miles down the Western Atlantic only to return to Long Island to bury its load.  No other country would accept the American trash.  This was a wake-up call. (Pellow, Schnaiberg and Weinberg 2000)

    In the early 1990s, waste management corporations implemented large-scale recycling programs to avoid further pressure from ecological organizations.  Groups plastered the slogan “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” across the country.  Over three years, the number of municipal recycling programs tripled.  By 1996, the community collection programs had been pushed out in favour of commercial recycling enterprises.  Economy replaced ecology. (Pellow, Schnaiberg and Weinberg 2000)

    Since 1996, North America has embraced recycling blindly.  With most urban centres on a full mixed-stream program, the blue bin has become a fixture in every household. Long forgotten are the days of plastic bottle returns.  We simply bin the recyclables in our homes and take them to the curb once a week.  Naively, we feel good about filling our blue bins. We see recycling as a matter of compliance.

    A crisis is coming.  We need become good accountants:  we must maximize the incoming resources while minimizing the global expense.

    First, let us separate out a large portion of the resources that we deal with on a daily basis:  packaging.  Everything that we touch usually arrives in some kind of packaging.  Packaging helps us to move things, hold things, preserve things and protect things.  We have invented the need for it:  we no longer pluck the fruit off the vine and enjoy it at that very moment.  We have someone else pick it, pack it, ship it, and unpack it before we may purchase it.  Rarely do we immediately consume what we purchase - because we bought so very much of it - thus it must remain packaged until the time is right.    

     It is unreasonable to ask that we stop using packaging altogether:  it has become essential in the first world.  As increasing numbers of developing countries demand the privileges of North America, more packaging will be required.  Evidently, we must find a solution that will provide plentiful amounts of packaging:  the income in our accounting scheme.  Not only must we produce many products, but they must also be versatile and capable of serving many purposes.

Flexibility in a material is what makes for the best packaging.  We must find moldable, punchable, rollable, foldable, and sealable materials.  Natural fibres such as wood pulp, thermoplastics such as polyethylene, metals like aluminum and steel, and composites such as glass are our current packaging resources.  To maximize the amount of packaging we can produce, we must minimize the material used in each product. Thus, bottles, boxes, and cans become thinner.

 There is a limit as to how little material a product may contain before it loses its structural integrity.  As demand increases and resources decrease, we will need to push beyond this limit.  Consequently, we introduce recycled content. Blending recycled material with raw material will decrease the amount of raw materials required to make a new product.  However, the integrity of the finished product must be equivalent to that of the same product made of only raw materials.  Therefore, we must look critically at each type of material.

Certain products, when recycled, suffer degradation in quality.  They are overly rigid, overly plastic, discoloured, or otherwise less desirable than the raw material.  These materials are less useful to include as recycled content in their original products.  Instead, they become different products using lower-grade recycled materials.  These types of materials have a linearly decreasing quality, resulting in a limited life cycle count.  As seen in Figure 1, most of the plastic materials that we call recyclable have a finite life span.  Note how some materials, when recycled, cannot become the initial product again.  For example, despite its infinite lifespan, P.E.T. is only recycled into fibrous materials and not into new bottles. (Sustainable Business Performance 2009-2010)

Figure 1: The cycle lifespan of everyday containers (ARCO Aluminum, Inc. 2011) (Planet Ark 2010) (BritGlass 2011) (Steel Recycling Institute 2011) (Sustainable Business Performance 2009-2010)

Some recycled materials are capable of undergoing a complete recycling process wherein they might offer the same quality as the raw material.  For example, in 60 days the aluminum can in your recycling bin can be entirely recycled into a new can. (ALCOA 2011) These materials would be capable of producing a new product with 100% recycled content.  In other words, it would have an infinite life span.  This is true recycling.

Since the boom of recycling about 20 years ago, the public has been encouraged to recycle.  Legislature that limits the number of garbage bags per household and unlimited recycling pick-up further encourages participation.  We have forgotten the concept of reuse.  Instead of recycling a glass jar, we could simply use it to store things- thereby gaining a container without using more resources.  There was a meaning behind the order of the original slogan ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’.  First, we must reduce our resource use, followed by reuse of products, and when the other two are not possible, recycle materials.  The simplest step to reducing the embodied energy of a product is to reuse it as is.  Since repurposing a container is not always practical, recycling continues to be a necessity.

We understand that landfills are finite places.  As the world population increases, humans produce increasing amounts of waste, yet the earth remains the same size.  Until we begin a space-landfill, we are limited in the places that we can dump our waste.  Hence, we understand that we should decrease the amount of packaging we send to the landfill.  Thus far, our best solution is to increase the amount of material we recycle.  This seems to be the extent of common knowledge of the expense of packaging.

Figure 2: A simplified life cycle diagram of an aluminum can

Before embarking on a study of the embodied energy of recycled packages, we should understand the process of fabricating packaging out of raw materials.  This will set a benchmark against which we can measure the recycled processes.

Figure 2 shows a simplified life cycle of an aluminum can.  Note the inputs may be either through recycling or through virgin ore.  Aluminum is an extreme example of resource saving from recycling.  By recycling aluminum, we can save 92% of the energy it would take to produce an equivalent product from virgin materials. (Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Inc. 2011)  This is mostly because of the extreme electricity cost of using the Bayer Process of electrolysis to extract alumina from bauxite. (Chem Guide 2010) Recycling one ton of aluminum will save 8 tons of bauxite ore and 14 mWh of electricity. (Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Inc. 2011) For every step in the aluminum cycle with an electricity icon, we must calculate a quantity of electricity used.  In the same manner, recycling facilities should quantify water and fuel use as well as CO₂ production at every step in the process.  Only with such data could we truly compare recycled materials’ and virgin materials’ resource use.

Each recycled material has a relationship to its equivalent product made from virgin ore.  Unfortunately, the data in Figure 3 is only measured in “energy”, which could be further divided.  Also noteworthy is that the Scrap Recycling Industries, who endorse metal recycling, published this data.  A thorough study of the processing of each raw material would have to be completed to use as adequate comparison against the recycled version.  As seen in Figure 2, however, it might be possible for some materials to assume that there is overlap in the processing of both recycled and raw materials.  Therefore, for Aluminum, we must compare only the extraction process to the recovery process.

Figure 3: The percentage of energy saved by using recycled materials instead of virgin materials (Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Inc. 2011)

To limit the expense of our packaging, we must think beyond the products themselves.  A life cycle analysis of a product would expose underlying recycling costs.  The recycling process incurs the expenses of transportation, electricity and fresh water use.  Often forgotten, these expenses are not counted in dollars, but more importantly, in resources.  Fossil fuels, electricity, and fresh water are all required to recycle materials.

To minimize the amount of transportation involved in recycling, either the distance travelled or the vehicle of choice must change.  Recycling programs have expanded across major Canadian cities in the last 10 years.  Regions have built depots and processing plants on the outskirts of cities and suburbs at alarming rates.  The frequency of plants, however, is an inadequate statistic.  Recycling facilities are often material-specific and are therefore unable to handle every item in a blue bin.  For example, an aluminum can may be recycled locally, but glass may have to travel to the next city to be recycled.  When considering the recyclability of a material, therefore it would be important to map the travel distances to the nearest processing facility for each material.

Increasing numbers of landfill sites have begun collecting the methane gas released in the decomposition process.  Municipalities then sell the biogas as a fuel to offset operating costs.  There are currently methanol fuel cell vehicles designed to use this naturally occurring gas as fuel.  Garbage and recycling trucks are already travelling to the dump on a regular basis:  the garbage itself could fuel the trucks.  The technology of methane refinement and fuel cell vehicle production is advancing daily.  Instead of selling the methane, trucks would fill up at the dump before making trips throughout the city.  Whereas gasoline internal combustion engines produce 7.553 g/mile of CO₂, methanol fuel cell vehicles produce only 0.004 g/mile. (Thomas, et al. 2000) That is a 95% improvement in CO₂ emissions from trucks alone.  Transportation of recyclables poses a potential improvement to the CO₂ emissions of the recycling process.

The best example of CO₂ production due to recycling is expanded polystyrene.  Styrofoam was once recyclable throughout Ontario.  The demand for the lower-grade recycled material was not able to keep up with the supply of used foam.  Plants shut down in droves, putting Styrofoam cups back in the landfill. (Franklin Associates Ltd. 1999) Once underground, it takes Styrofoam over a million years to biodegrade.  Thus, we choose not to bury foam; we incinerate it.  Depending on the fabricator, the best possible outcome of incinerated Styrofoam is a combination of carbon dioxide, water, and ash. (DART 2011)  So whether the local landfill incinerates Styrofoam, or drives it over a hundred kilometers to the nearest recycling facility, carbon dioxide will be produced.

The incineration of Styrofoam is just one layer of the unspoken costs of our waste.  For every item that we send to the landfill, we understand that it is either buried or incinerated.  Burying our problems is flawed logic considering our limited planet and increasing population.  Incineration may produce energy, but will release undesirable gasses into the atmosphere.  We turn to recycling as a way to solve our waste problems, assuming that reuse and reprocessing is better for the environment because we are not harvesting raw resources.  This is yet debatable.

Materials arrive at a Material Recovery Facility (MRF) in a variety of states of cleanliness.  To begin recycling, machines and workers must sort and clean every piece of waste before any further processing can occur.  One of the forgotten expenses of recycling is the fresh water used in washing materials.  For example, in the fabrication of an aluminum can, four of the seven cleaning steps involve rinsing with fresh water. (Earth911 2011) Quantified, this amount of water could be compared to the amount of water used to make an equivalent can from virgin materials.  Like our finite landfill space, our fresh water resources are precious and worth preserving.  If we reduce the amount of water used in the process, we will improve the resource expense cost per can.  These reductions may require a refinement to the efficiency of the equipment, or perhaps implementing a grey-water recycling program.  The first step, however, is diagnosing where industry stands today.

There are materials that save fresh water by being recycled.  The pulping of wood fibres to make paper uses gallons of fresh water annually.  The estimated minimum quantity of water used is currently 10,000 gallons per ton of finished product. (Mehta 1996) By simply recycling paper and cardboard products, we greatly reduce the required pulping process.  When compared to the water usage during production from virgin materials, recycling cardboard can use up to 99% less water. (Planet Ark 2010) This data represents the recycling of pulp with the ink remaining.  The best quality of recycled paper requires de-inking, a process that is a contended use of fresh water. (Siemens 2010)

As seen in Figure 2, the life cycle of aluminum requires electricity, water, and fuel, and produces CO₂.  Each material we throw into a blue bin has its own cycle that includes fuel use, CO₂ production, and water and electricity usage.  In terms of electricity, if aluminum is expensive to produce from bauxite, then steel is expensive to produce from recycled materials.  Unlike aluminum, steel has a high melting point, and must therefore be heated to higher temperatures in order to become molten.  Modern steel recycling is done with an electric arc furnace (EAF).  This process uses graphite electrodes thrust into a vat of cold scrap steel.  When electricity runs through the electrodes, arcs form between the nodes and the steel melts.  Several electric shocks occur as the probes progress through the steel until it reaches a molten state.  The EAF uses less than half the electricity of the traditional basic oxygen steelmaking technique.  However, at 7.4 GJ of electricity per ton of steel, this remains no small expense. (EGS Tam Celik 2007)

Unlike steel, which requires the same EAF process to break down recycled material or raw material, melting recycled glass is easier than the raw materials.  Chipped, washed, and colour-sorted recycled glass melts at a lower temperature than virgin glass. (BritGlass 2011) By decreasing the temperature of the furnace, glass fabricators can reduce electricity use and CO₂ production.  Recycled content in new jars is therefore desirable and widely used to limit expenses.

If each recycling facility could track the electricity required to process one ton of each material, progress could be made.  Recognizing that each process is different and materials will perhaps perform better in electricity or water usage, data must be found to allow direct comparison.  Fuel usage, carbon dioxide production, electricity usage, and water usage are simple quantities that are comparable across many recyclable household materials.  Facilities can share knowledge by tracking resource use for everyday container recycling.  Although industries differ, there is always a possibility that the efficiency found in one recycling process may apply to another.  Self-criticism and accountability to the public could change the way we recycle for the better.  Record keeping for the incoming and outgoing resources at recycling facilities is the first step.

The current method of ‘accounting’ for a material is life cycle analysis.  The examination of the incoming and outgoing energies and resources a product requires is time consuming and may expose inefficiencies in a process.  It may also induce change.  If industrial facilities had an understanding of the life cycle of their product, they could make critical decisions.  Before there can be improvement there must be education.  Specialists could teach industry leaders about life cycle analysis.  The industry leaders should then scrutinize their recycling procedures.  However, any progress made will be worthless if the public remains ignorant of the issues.  We must take pride in our recycling progress and teach the public about the life cycles of the products they buy.  Once aware of the lifespan of a product, a consumer may choose to purchase less of a certain material.  Consumers may provide greater support to infinitely recyclable products.  Education could shift the market and even improve the economic benefit to recycling.  Although a life cycle analysis may be expensive or difficult to undergo, it could create future financial gain.

Unfortunately, holistic knowledge of the life cycle of a product is currently rare within the packaging industry.  This ignorance, caused by fear, lack of funds, or naivety, it is preventing innovation.  The recycling industry has grown exponentially in the last twenty years.  We are continuously finding ways of processing materials for reuse. However, without comparable data, how can we compare them equally?  It is time that recycling facilities began taking a critical look at their processes.

While the industrial sector is educated, so must the public.  The better we understand resource accounting, the better off we all will be.  Simply starting by explaining the recycling process of everyday containers, we could generate awareness in the community.  A life cycle diagram (See Figure 2) of a small selection of products would be sufficient:  aluminum, steel, newsprint, cardboard, glass, and cartons.  We must eliminate the compliant recycling drones and create critical citizens.

If it takes a crisis to create awareness, it may yet be a few years before industries complete life cycle analyses and track resource use at recycling facilities.  Until that time, public inquiry and curiosity will have to lead the way out of ignorance.

References

ALCOA. "ALCOA: Environment: What you can do." ALCOA Global. 2011. http://www.alcoa.com/global/en/environment/climate_change/recycling.asp (accessed March 3, 2011).

ARCO Aluminum, Inc. "Environment and Safety: Just for Kids." ARCO Aluminum. 2011. http://www.arcoaluminum.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9012018&contentId=7023069 (accessed March 4, 2011).

Braungart, Michael, and William McDonough. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press, 2002.

BritGlass. "The Glass Recycling Cycle." BritGlass. 2011. www.britglass.org.uk/Files/Recycling_Text.doc (accessed March 4, 2011).

Chem Guide. Extracting Aluminum from Bauxite. 2010. http://www.chemguide.co.uk/inorganic/extraction/aluminium.html (accessed March 3, 2011).

DART. "Green Care: Environmental Facts about Dart Foam Products." Foam Facts for Canada. 2011. http://www.foamfacts.com/ (accessed March 1, 2011).

Earth911. Earth911. 2011. www.earth911.com (accessed March 3, 2011).

EGS Tam Celik. Steel making with electric arc furnace. 2007. http://www.arcfurnace.com/electric_arc_furnaces.html (accessed March 4, 2011).

Franklin Associates Ltd. Waste Management and Reduction Trends in the Polystyrene Industry, 1974-1996. Franklin Associates, Ltd, 1999.

Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Inc. "Industry Factsheet." About ISRI. 2011. http://www.isri.org/iMIS15_PROD/ISRI/About_ISRI/Industry_Facts/ISRI/Navigation/AboutISRI/Industry_Facts.aspx?hkey=9e68d6a2-7b25-4a0e-ac22-06a259f893cc (accessed March 3, 2011).

Mehta, Yogesh. "Reduced water use critical to minimum-impact manufacturing." Pulp & Paper, 1996.

Pellow, David N., Allan Schnaiberg, and Adam S. Weinberg. "Putting the Ecological Modernization Thesis to the Test: The Promises and Performances of Urban Recycling." In Ecological modernisation around the world: persectives and critical debates, by A. P. J. Mol and David Allan Sonnenfeld, 109-202. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000.

Persaud, Paul, interview by Author. Norwich Plastics (February 17, 2011).

Planet Ark. "Document 180- Cardboard Factsheet." Festive Recycling: Something we can all address. 2010. http://festiverecycling.planetark.org/documents/doc-180-cardboard-factsheet.pdf (accessed March 4, 2011).

Siemens. De-inked Pulp. 2010. http://www.industry.siemens.com/industrysolutions/global/en/paper/de-inked_pulp/Pages/Default.aspx (accessed March 4, 2011).

Steel Recycing Institute. "Steel Recycling Rates at a Glance." Steel Recycling Institute. 2011. http://www.recycle-steel.org/en/Steel%20Markets/Cans/~/media/Files/SRI/Media%20Center/2008Graphs.ashx (accessed March 1, 2011).

Steel Recycling Institute. Minimizing the Life Cycle Impact of North American Steel. 2011. http://www.recycle-steel.org/Sustainability/Life%20Cycle%20Information.aspx (accessed March 4, 2011).

Sustainable Business Performance. "The sustainable business: Product." Sustainable Business Performance. 2009-2010. http://www.sustainbusper.com/reuse-remanufacturing-and-recycling (accessed March 4, 2011).

Thomas, C.E., Brian D. James, Frank D. Lomax Jr, and Ira F. Kuhn Jr. "Fuel options for the fuel cell vehicle: hydrogen, methanol, or gasoline?" International Journal of Hydrogen Energy- 25, 2000: 551-567.

Recycling Part 2

I have tried to reach waste management professionals for two weeks with limited success. Even industrial websites seem to hide behind a blue bin and bury their statistics within unreachable files. Unless I become a member of all the associations, it seems that I can only get teacher's resource material on recycling:

Question: "How do we recycle steel?"

Answer: "We wash it out and put it in the blue box!"

I'm sorry, but this is not going to cut it for me. People should know that steel is crushed and baled and sent to an electric arc furnace to be zapped with enough electricity to make it molten. It's then cast into ingots or extruded into shapes. And what about the trucks that drive around miles of suburban streets collecting it all? Or the fresh water that is used to clean or rinse out all the materials at the recycling depot? 

I fear that recyclers are only doing financial accounting, i.e. Recycling equals money, measured in dollars, calculated by (expenses-income) / lbs of material recycled. What needs to be done is resource accounting. What are we putting in and taking out of the planet in the greater life cycle of this recycled material? A recycler could take his electricity and water bills and the quantity of material recycled and at least know a ballpark figure of how expensive recycling is in terms of these resources. A simple calculation could be done.

But nobody seems to do anything if there isn't a financial incentive.

We, the public, should be aware of what we are doing every time we throw a tin (steel) can in our blue bins. Or Aluminum cans, cardboard boxes, glass jars, plastic bottles, or newspapers.

I'm working on pulling together the information that is publicly accessible in this regard. Wherever it is lacking (which is common), I intend to be critical and ask questions. I want to set up a way for recyclers to track resources. I want the public to be knowledgeable, knowing what recycling is going on in their neighbourhood. Ignorance is not going to improve our recycling programs; it's a matter of educated accounting.

The more you know about finances, the more money you save.

The more you know about recycling, the more resources you save.