16 ways to solve Trash

Notes taken by Patrick Reany

16 Ways To Solve Trash, From Recycling Jeans To Making Bricks From Tires - Season 4 Marathon (YouTube video) .. Business Insider

Introduction: Waste is becoming a commodity -- sometimes a profitable one, and that makes sense. We just need to put on our thinking caps to figure out how. Hundreds of tires per day. 150 tires/hour. And a hundred fulltime employees. The US alone had over a billion old tires by year 2000. What to do with them? Just let them fill up our landfills? Please no! At this point, the US burns 1/3 of its tires to run cement kilns and paper mills and uses another 1/3 is turned into rubber surfaces. So, less than 20% ends up in landfills. Yea!

There are seven types of plastics, of which most recycling centers will only take in two:

1) PET, 2) HDPE, 3 PVC, 4) LDPE, 5) PP, 6) PS, 7) Other

I want to make an observation: There is these days an economy of scale regarding recycling that did not always exist over so many recyclable items. Because there is so much waste these days, it is now cost effective to build large recycling plants that can bring in waste and modify it by reducing it or repurposing it, or whatever. Therefore, there's less excuse now for not recycling than ever before. 12 billion dollar global industry of tire recycling.

And before we begin, I want to address all the negative and false statements made about recycling by all of its naysayers out there. This is my motto:

Recycling finds a way!

Nigeria tire recycling business.

Tires are shredded and then used to made rubber bricks for playgrounds.

In another place, used chopsticks are cleaned and compressed in machines to boards that were invented by the company's owner. The world is in the place of sufficient technological prowess that a small-company owner can take an idea for a small one-off machine to be built and there's a company out there somewhere that can probably build it.

Every good recycling or upcycling idea that works in one locale might work in a thousand other locales, employing local people as they go. Often the business procedure is to mix together high-tech processing machines with traditional craftmanship.

France,

Recycling slightly used soap bars from hotels are collected, shaved down to remove surface impurities. But special machines can do it faster, resulting in small bits of soap bar. From that, it enters and exits and extruder to form a long piece of soap that is then cut into regularly sized new bars of soap.

In the US, used soap bars are sent into a large machine that excoriates each bar of soap and then extrudes noodle-like tubes of soap which are then cut. From there, the pellets are sanitized in a hopper/mixer. Then it is made into a long bar that get cut to standard sized bars of soap, which are sent around the world to impoverished countiues for basic sanitation.

Many of these company start ups are recent and instigated by basically ordinary people with a vision to use a waste product for some beneficial or even profitable purpose. The good ideas do not always start with the billionaires or the big companies, who often lack imagination or are comfortable with whatever process they have committed to, and naysay everything else that looks "hard to do," especially with plastics.

International Paper [IP]: The good news is that cardboard (corrugated packaging) is already highly recycled, but new pine trees are also brought into the recycling effort. IP buys acres of forest pines to harvest; after which the ground is replanted with long leaf pines. The trees are transported to the facility, debarked, reduced to chips, and deposited in a huge pile. The chips are further reduced by using steam to remove the natural binding material called lignin, leaving a mass of fibers and toxic chemicals. These chemicals are burned off, creating a source of energy. But this comes at a price of releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere.

Then, to complete the process, old carboard is addied into the mix of wood pulp. Some good news is that IP has processes that allow it to use food contaminated boxes, like pizza boxes, and boxes with tape. However, IP only takes in cardboard from within 300 miles of its Georgia plant -- 500 tons of it daily. Once the new pulp and the pulp made from cardboard are mixed together and then process into paper, the paper rolls are transported to other sites that deal with rolls of paper. From this point, the reduction of paper to cardboard boxes is nearly fully automated, producing boxes of various sizes, colors, and printing on them.

Percentages of Carboard recycled in the US: 70+ %
Percentages of aluminum recycled in the US: 35 %
Percentages of glass recycled in the US: 31 %
Percentages of plastic recycled in the US: 9 %

New cardboard cannot be recycled indefinitely, but only for about seven times before its fibers are so reduced that they exit the processing as waste.

From seaweed farms we can harvest the produce and convert it into marvelous plastic-like substances. This stuff can be used to make wrapper material substitues that can decrease the amount of plastic wrappings. [ZeroCircle] The seaweed can be grown on racks in shallow water, requiring no fertilizers or special care. Many locals are given jobs growing seaweed. Before the labs receive the processed seaweed, the effort is very low-tech.

The first process of the SW is to grandulate it and then to wash it. After solvent are used, the result is a gel-like substance that can be put into molds. The end product will dissolve readily in water, and last only months (not years) in a compost pile. The uses for this material are many, and the race is on to bring its unit price down to comparable to similar plastic products. There's even a seaweed form of glue.

Pineapple recycling: Pineapple scraps can be converted into cleaning agents. Traditional detergents are rich in nitrogen and phosphorus -- two chemicals that pollute water ways and cause algael blooms.

Rotting fruit releases methane -- a harmful greenhouse gas, being worse than carbon dioxide. Also, the throwaway pineapples would only takeup space in landfills, when they are not used by this recycling plant. After cleaning the fruit, it is added to water and sugar solution, allowing micro-organisms to ferment the mixture. But this fermentation process produces more than mere alcohol; it also releases enzymes and acids into the fluid from the pineapple.

This process takes threemonths, after which the mixtures are filtered to remove the cleaning part from the plant matter residue, which will be used as fertilizer. After a few more additives are included in the mix, the fluid is bottled and sold as soap throughout Vietnam and to online customers.

We are only at the beginning of researching enzyme-activated detergents, or biodetergents and cleaners, which may, in the end be not only cheaper than industrial cleaners, but safer as well.

Jeans recycling: About a billion pairs of jeans are dumped into landfills each year. A company in Pakistan found a way to recycle old denim into new products. It begins by workers sorting through 25 metric tons of clothes each day. [These old clothes are mostly imported from clothes that didn't sell at thrift stores in America and Europe.] From there, bundles of still-usable clothes are taken to Ghana and sold there to venders. But the low-quality clothes are taken to company for reducing the materials into completely different-use products.

Denim jeans are first cut up into small strips, which are then further reduced in size and stored in large bails. 800 metric tons of jeans are thus processed every month. However, the fibers from used denim are too short for further processing, so virgin cotton needs to be added into to them. The current mix uses 30% used cotton in new clothing production.

Anyway, the next step is to make yarn spools from this two-sourced cotton. The company uses waste indigo to dye the new fabric. The long process of transforming old jeans into new jeans begins with low tech and ends up in a massively large production facility, providing economies of scale.

Boyan Slat, founder of The Ocean Cleanup, is removing plastics from the ocean to recycle them. But he also specializes in catching plastics flowing down rivers before they enter the sea. The boats used ot collect this waste are called "Interceptors."

One of these Interceptors has been working on a river in the Dominican Republic. The process works by skimming the surface where most plastic waste moves down river. This skimming also removes an invasive species of water hyacinth.

Sidebar: From Business Insider: In Cambodia, people removed water hyacinths by hand and dry them and then use the stems to weave beautiful and functional handbags, coasters, baskets, area rugs. In other places, the weeds are used as compost or biogas.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g83Fu0R2GGM] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Eb1atlh17U -- Turning menacing hyacinth into manure | DW English]

Making Bricks: Bricks can be made from Sargassum, a brown seaweed and an "invasive specie washing up and rotting on beaches around North America." Omar Vasquez runs a business using sargassum to make reddish bricks strong enough to use to construct houses with. His people are often paid to remove the stuff from beaches, up to 40 metric tons per day, placing it in wheelbarrows then into large containers.

The first step is to smash the seaweed into a fine powder and then to mix that with dirt to form a paste and then put that into brick forms. Furthermore, these sargobricks can be themselves recycled.

Sargassum is a growing problem to Mexico, and to US states of Texas and Florida.

New start-ups are using sargassum to make notebooks and shoes.

In Gaza, old plastic buckets are used to recycle into plastic string, which can be used to make rugs or mats. This innovated mindset recovers trash already in landfils. The plastic buckets are first cut down with saws and then shredded. The resulting chips are then washed and dried. They use only PP plastics. The chips are then heated to melting and extruded into strands and reduced to granules. Now the granules are remelted, and made into strips suitable for weaving. From these mats are made.

Clever people are at work in Gaza to recycle and re-purpose the trash around them: "We've learned that necessity is the mother of invention."

Recycling of health and beauty products: One British business has decided to tackle the problem of recycling these objects, which few recycling centers will

Recycling finds a way!

Kudos to Refactory for trying to output finished products that the customers do not need to modify themselves, for that would create micoplastics that could get into the environment.

Disneyworld produces a lot of trash! But where is it? It's methods are top secret, but a similar method of trash removal has been used at Roosevelt Island, New York for about 50 years. How does that work?

The trash is dropped into a piping system in which air moves through it at 60 mph. The future is yesterday, but today its acronym is AVAC. About 8 tons of trash moves through the tubes daily. The trash is then compressed and placed into large containers, which are picked up on a daily schedule to be moved to an off-island site in Queens. The brag is that the trash rmoval system used in the islands makes the island cleaner then the traditional means of trash depositing, pickup, and removal.

Ivory Coast. What to do with hard-to-recycle plastics? There's a company [Conceptos Plasticos] that takes in all the plastics that no one else wants to deal with and converts it to buidling material construction plastic blocks of an interlocking form. The plastic is collected by locals, who get paid for it. Crushed chips are then melted. And, YES, there is a similar process used for grocery bags!!

The major types of products made there are bricks and columns. The company is keeping their exact processing proprietary for now.

The Polyfloss Factory, based in Paris, makes fiberous plastic threds that can be used for insulation. This company also ships its simple technology all over the world for easy of use locally. This process was the brainchild of four engineering graduates who imagined creating a simple way to convert waste plastics into something usable. They started their effort in 2011, and after many less-than-great designs, they eventually found the right design. In 2014, they had a breakthrough. Hurray!

Their lightweight processor takes in recycled plastic pellets that are available from other recycling companies. The machines uses PET or PP plastics. Polyfloss is safe to touch and to be around, though it must be protected from ignition sources.

For Polyfloss this is just the beginning!

A Netherlands company [FastFeetGrinded] recycles shoes, up to 2500 shoes per hour. It can recycle every part of a shoe, which can include plastic, nylon, metal, rubber, and glue. This wonderful process didn't come easy. The founders had to experiment with many means to reduce shoes, until their successful method was found. And what about the glue that needs to be removed? It is removed merely by a precise form of heating. FFG does a nearly complete reduction of the various materials into their uncontaminated forms. And what do you think they did with all that raw material for making shoes? Yes, they opened their own shoe store.

Hey, it's not all about small startup making the naysays out to be fools. Adidas is trying to do what it can as well. In 2015, it started to use ocean-recovered plastics.

Researchers at UC San Diego are trying to make shoes from biodegradable materials. Then they tried algae oils. Another startup takes plastics bags from landfills to make shoes.

Ultimately, when recycling is done right, there will be no leftover scraps to end up in the landfill.