Very heavy truck, bulky but light recycled scrap. Does recycling reduce or increase our carbon footprint?
Ralfcode, the few kilogrammes of old tin cans on that 15 tonne 20 mile journey truck might make sense, I expect you’ve done the sums. Perhaps you could elaborate with your calculations.
Hipp 5, I understand where you are coming from, I really do. My main concern is the very inefficient method of scrap collection. Looking at the whole process I see, washing out the can (wasteful), collecting the can in mostly empty trucks and transporting a very modest payload several miles (wasteful), at the beginning of what may be a very efficient process. This area of recycling needs looking at. Perhaps these trucks should be compressing the cans on collection and making far fewer trips.
All this leaves the problem, what to do with other waste, like the vast array of incompatible plastics. This problem needs tackling at the beginning of the life cycle, legislation on fewer plastics and colour coding spring to mind.
Recycling aluminium may be better than mining it, but you can’t tell me there isn’t room for improvement. At the moment the main motivation for recycling aluminium is profit, and not conserving the planets valuable resources and reducing the carbon footprint.
Recycling can never be suitable for EVERY situation in total economic and/or balance of energy terms. There will Alwaysbe situations where on the face of it would seem ‘better’ to not bother. However Humans need to stop thinking about the NOW and consider the effects of our decisions and actions in excess of 100 years from now. i.e when our children are still likely to be alive, let alone our later descendants.
Materials that ’seem’ almost infinite now e.g. glass, aluminium etc will eventually run out or get more and more precious as the population increases and more and more material ‘wealth’ is required. Also the pressure on those more available resources will increase as more finite materials get used up quicker. On top of this as ‘easy’ energy becomes less and less available and the true cost of energy increases the manufacturing of all materials will become a greater burden and more difficult to achieve.
So - in reality the recycling of materials is a much a moral issue that in the end will improve our descendant’s lives, maybe not ours. Also to recycle is morally more justifiable than living in a throwaway society that in essence is selfish to us and the world around us.
Carbon footprint is pure bull!
That said it does take a lot of energy to mine transport and refine metals as opposed to simply hauling them for recycling. A good solution is to either shred or bale the scrap before transportation. This saves the generator of scrap money too!
I’m not sure what you mean about the truck or bulky scrap. Try elaborating just a bit.
Recycling metal is almost always more cost efficient, as it takes about 5% of the energy to melt and reuse steel, for example, as it does to smelt the same amount out of steel ore. Recycling other products keeps them out of the waste stream.
Edit: Ah - that’s easier to understand. Thank you for clarifying.
I see several options:
- haul the metal in a smaller vehicle,
- throw it on when you’ve got another load and you can combine the trips,
- save the stuff until you’ve got several tons of metal,
- have someone else haul it, when they’re already going in
- find a closer dropoff point.
You sound like you’re in the UK. I have no idea what the recycling system is like there, so I have to base my comments on what you tell me, and what I know of here. I’ve been involved in recycling metal on the small scale - my household - and on a larger scale - as in, helping to load and haul about 35 tons of scrap metal from buildings, cars, car parts, and a raft of other sources. The last took 3 semi trucks to haul it all. Think BIG lorries, AP - 75-80 foot long diesel rigs that could probably drag mid-sized trees out of the ground by their roots. Those went to a commercial scrap metal dealer who paid a nice price to our group for hauling it. There’s another 7-8 tons waiting to go again, once the price of scrap steel climbs out of the basement.
In your case, though, you have to take local conditions into account, which wasn’t clearly explained in your original question. But I expect that if you look around a bit, you’ll have some other options, like I listed above. Unless, of course, that 15 ton truck is your daily driver.
Signed, Ralfcoder — who has an "R" on both ends of his name.
The fact with recycling is not that it reduces our energy usage (as even to convert used cans etc into useful material it has to be refined again, using further energy) but that it reduces the amount of raw materials that we have to take out of the ground. Metals are a finite source in the earth and if we just keep throwing it away after use then eventually it will run out. The price of raw ores is also set to increase rapidly in the next few years due to recession and when this happens more emphasis will be put on reusing materials that have already been mined such as aluminium.
you might be right for cardboard, that’s why you have to pay to get it taken away commercially. only other scrap that might qualify would be plastics, they are always crushed and baled for bulk transfer, i took a load once to the factory where it was turned back to pellets, about 6 tons on 48 pallets. but the value obviously made the journey worthwhile.
as for footprint, that of recycled plastic (and ally, and glass) will always be much less than that of initial manufacture/smelting.
Overall I’d say it increases it. Not only through the transportation issue you’re referring to, but consider: HOW do they melt the scrap and re-use it? Smelters usually work through an electric induction system.
The factory near Bellingham WA for example runs an electric bill of about $6,000,000 a MONTH!! that’s 6million dollars of electric power that was generated via some method. HERE it’s hydroelectric, but many places use coal… or other polluting electric generation methods.
Yes, recycling requires the driving of a truck. Yes, recycling also requires electricity to run the recycling plant. BUT, what you have to remember is that raw resource extraction requires that as well, and generally much more. Studies that have looked at the WHOLE life of recycled aluminum vs. new aluminum have shown that recycled uses 95% less energy over the WHOLE process. If you look at the process, you’ll understand why.
Virgin aluminum must be mined by backhoes. Problem is, aluminum doesn’t exist as aluminum in nature - it comes as the ore, bauxite. So, these backhoes not only spend energy digging aluminum, they also spend energy digging the useless other materials that make up the ore. Then, the ore must be put in a huge dump truck (more carrying of pointless extras). Then, the aluminum must be separated from the bauxite, which is a HUGELY energy intensive endeavor. Then, it must be melted and made into rolls for shipment.
Recycled aluminum skips out on the backhoes and huge dump trucks that are wasting energy carrying bauxite ore and just goes right to a little collection truck that only carries aluminum. Recycling aluminum also skips out on the tons and tons of energy that is used to separate the aluminum from bauxite and just goes to the melting part.
So you see, if you look at the big picture, recycling comes out on top. When whole-life analysis was done for a wide range of materials it was found that recycling ALWAYS used less energy than virgin materials. Some materials don’t get you as much of an advantage (recycled glass only uses about 10% less energy) but there is always an advantage.
There was a really good National Geographic article on this about four or five months ago.
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