Sorting Waste: Beyond Metals

Part 1 focused on recycling scrap metal, ferrous and nonferrous.  In this part, we’ll take a look at sorting waste types beyond metals.

Because of their weight, processing C&D materials is important to those having to meet diversion mandates, points out Brendan McKenzie, national sales manager, OSA Demolition Equipment. “Not only are you saving landfill space, but it’s [also] huge money,” he says.

Recently, McKenzie was speaking to an end user of his company’s products in California, who indicated to him that some recyclable products are now so valuable “they’re actually mining landfills” to retrieve them. “They’re going back and looking for metal they threw away a few decades ago,” he notes. “It’s basically money buried right there in their landfill.”

According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), studies show that the practice creates and supports hundreds of thousands jobs in the US and generates billions in revenue for federal, state, and local governments. It’s not uncommon in some areas of the US to see vehicles canvassing neighborhoods, looking for valuable recyclable scrap materials put out for trash removal before the solid waste trucks arrive, to say nothing of occasional occurrences of outright theft of materials.

Here’s an ISRI breakdown of commodities and their markets:

Sorting Waste: Recovered fiber
Paper and board is one of the most widely recycled materials worldwide. Since 1990, Americans have recycled approximately 1 billion tons of recovered fiber as the recovery rate for paper and paperboard in the US nearly doubled to reach 65.1% in 2012. The scrap recycling industry’s paper recycling segment processes the recovered fiber into specification grade products that were valued at $8.4 billion in 2012. The products are sold and transported to paper mills domestically and globally for production into new packaging, office paper, tissue, newsprint, and other paper products. Some 76% of US paper mills rely on recovered fiber to make some or all of their products, partially due to cost and energy savings. Recovered paper is exported to 85 countries at a value of about $3.5 billion.

Sorting Waste: Plastics
Between 1950 and 2011, the global production of plastics grew at an average rate of 9% annually, and in 2011 global plastics production increased by 10 million tons to 280 million tons. According to EPA, plastic recycling results in an energy savings of an estimated 50–75 MBTUs per ton of material recycled compared with production of new plastics using virgin material. This scrap segment is a relatively new one in recycling, with the technology to cost-effectively sort and recycle it being only about 25 years old, ISRI points out, adding that the segment faces challenges: among them, convincing manufacturers of the benefits of using plastics made from scrap.

Sorting Waste: Glass
Glass can be recycled without loss in quality or purity. In 2010, 37% of all glass bottles in the US were recycled, according to the Container Recycling Institute. For every ton of glass recycled, more than 1 ton of raw materials—as well as greenhouse gas emissions—is saved. An estimated 80% of recovered glass containers are made into new glass bottles.

Sorting Waste: Electronics
This segment has matured over the past decade and has boosted the US economy by approximately $20.6 billion, including exports of $1.45 billion—up from less than $1 billion in 2002. In 2011, the US electronics recycling industry processed more than 4.4 million tons of used and end-of-life electronics equipment. Over 70% of the collected equipment is manufactured into specification grade commodities, such as scrap steel, aluminum, copper, lead, circuit boards, plastics, and glass, which are sold to basic materials manufacturers in the US and globally as raw material feedstock for new products such as steel, copper, aluminum, plastic, and glass. Electronics recyclers repair, refurbish, and resell functioning electronics equipment as used products into domestic and global markets. Up to 75% of the market volume is collected from businesses and commercial interests. In February 2013, the US International Trade Commission’s study, “Used Electronic Products: An Examination of US Exports” found that over 80% of the Used Electronic Products collected in the US were recycled, reused, or refurbished domestically, while only 17% were exported. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Materials Systems Laboratory and the US National Center for Electronics Recycling in 2013 indicated that over 90% of used electronics collected for recycling within the US remain in the US for processing and are not exported.

Sorting Waste: Tires
Each year, some 100 million tires are processed by the recycling industry. Scrap tire rubber is used in the manufacture of new tires, playground surfaces, equestrian mats, and rubberized asphalt, among other products, with scrap processors producing 1.1 billion pounds of crumb rubber in 2012 used to create those.

Sorting Waste: Textiles
According to Scrap magazine, 2 million tons of clothing and textiles are recovered pre-consumer and post-consumer in the US each year and recycled as new raw materials for the automotive, furniture, mattress, coarse yarn, home furnishings, paper, and other industries. Garments in good condition are exported for global resale.