Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It

Re:Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t ... by sjwright on Saturday December 21, 2019 @09:41PM (#21854805)

Until someone creates a machine that can pulverise anything into a fine powder and progressively sort each granule into their constituent metal, plastic, silica and organic type.

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Re:Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t ... by maxerickson on Saturday December 21, 2019 @09:43PM (#21854815)

You use that machine on better ore.

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Re:Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t ... by garmaine on Monday December 23, 2019 @03:58PM (#21867311)

That doesn’t make chemical sense. There is a huge energetic cost to smelting ore to remove the oxides, vs. landfill material that is exactly what you need but just needs to be sorted and cleaned.

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Re:Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t ... by maxerickson on Monday December 23, 2019 @07:53PM (#21868965)

The concentrations of valuable materials in the landfill are minuscule. It doesn't make energy sense to sort it even though the fractions are relatively ready to use.

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Re:Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t ... by sjwright on Sunday December 22, 2019 @05:03AM (#21856244)

Use it on landfill and you get to mine many desirable materials in one place.

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Re:Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t ... by tclancy on Saturday December 21, 2019 @10:59PM (#21855086)

Or recyclables.

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Re:Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t ... by maxerickson on Sunday December 22, 2019 @11:18AM (#21857962)

There are places that run their entire waste stream through a recovery plant:

http://waste-technology.co.uk/what-is-a-dirty-mrf-and-why-th...

A substantial portion of the waste stream is just organic material (which is worth very little).

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