Turning Garbage into Gold

bart_scriv writes "Entrepreneurs are creating companies that exploit the creative opportunities in other people's junk, sparing the environment in the process. The article looks at green entrepreneurship in general and profiles some specific companies, whose products range from recycled printer cartridges to rubber sidewalks. It also includes a slideshow on the process of making rubber sidewalks. From the article: 'While innovation has always been the entrepreneur's trademark, a growing interest in the green movement is propelling small business owners to create new products and services that also happen to be inventive recycling solutions for the country's vast waste heaps. 'The sustainability and restoring of our environment are providing opportunities in many fields of small business,' says John Stayton, co-founder and director of the Green MBA program at San Francisco's New College of California.'"

Yeah

So what are they going to turn Linux into?

wow-wee

I was hoping for something relatively cool in the rubber sidewalk slide show - instead, all I got is some shots of ground up rubber and a very ho-hum sidewalk paver install. *yawn*

Re:trash to treasure

A great application of nanotechnology and robotics would be to create bots which would sift through the landfills and separate out all the different substances: 'chew' the stuff and spit out the various components. But I fear it's too late ... the world's economy is going to tank before we have time to develop such a thing.

Re:wow-wee

I posted about rubber sidewalks in another forum... here's better links:

Christian Science Monitor story [csmonitor.com]

Rubber Sidewalk company page [rubbersidewalks.com]

Economical? Not yet, and not far away from California. Maybe if you're a streets & sanitation manager for a rich town and have money to blow in exchange for lower maintenance cost down the road. But that's why I appreciate small businesses in America and worldwide; they can be effective in their own niche and take risks that bigger companies wouldn't make.

Check the cost. Labor ain't cheap.

The bags made out of old inner tubes cost way more than similar bags imported from China and sold at Walmart.

The trick to recycling is to do so in an economic manner.

Re:Check the cost. Labor ain't cheap.

Very little of recycling is anything but very wasteful. Penn and Teller did an episode of their show "Bullshit!" about it and it was quite illuminating. In terms of energy costs and such, the only time recycling ever turns a benefit is in the case of aluminum cans. Everything else is a huge waste. Especially paper, since all of our paper comes from tree farms specifically grown to supply paper. You're not killing acres of forest when you throw out paper, you're probably planting a new tree.

And don't get me started on the fact that plastics only last 1000 years in a dump if you bury it like an idiot. Plastics are photosensitive and will decay rapidly if just left where they can get sunlight.

Re:Check the cost. Labor ain't cheap.

The problem is that you are thinking in terms of energy and not raw materials. Depending on where the energy is coming from, using more in recycling vs. production may not be a problem. If the raw materials are in limited supply or dumping space is limited, the recycling still makes sense if you can recycle significant quantities. Although I didn't watch the Bullshit episode.They may have covered more than just the energy aspect.

The paper issue is interesting though because you might consider discarded paper as a carbon sink.

As for not burying plastic... What do you suggest we do with it? Fill desert areas with trash? What kind of chemicals does decaying plastic leave behind?

-matthew

Re:Check the cost. Labor ain't cheap.

Especially paper, since all of our paper comes from tree farms specifically grown to supply paper. You're not killing acres of forest when you throw out paper, you're probably planting a new tree.

Not true. From our experience (in Brazil), this monoculture aproach using non-native species leads to as much wildlife wipeout and soil/underground water spoiling as the damned "Queimadas", wich is the practice of burning the forest to give way to soybean crops and/or bovine pasture.

Re:Check the cost. Labor ain't cheap.

tree farms

With a few exceptions there are no such things as "tree farms". There are forests. Some of them are managed and some of them are not.

The problem with your logic is that the tree you just "planted" by throwing out paper (wtf?), is not going to provide: shade or habitat or prevent erosion or breathe in a comparable amount of carbon dioxide. There are lots of other externalities you've neglected to account for, such as the chemical treatment it takes to produce paper pulp from wood (more so than recycled pulp). Nobody counts that because it gets dumped into the air, oceans and rivers.

According to some reports, many of North America's largest catalogs and tissue product manufacturers use virgin boreal pulp [nrdc.org].

Often in managed forests, where, as you triumphantly declare: trees are "specifically grown to supply paper", the trees that have been planted are not indigenous to the region. This endangers native plant and animal species, such as in Chile [panda.org].

Re:how is this recycling, anyway?

Every trip through the recycling cycle degrades the material to some extent...

Nonsense. Aluminum is aluminum is aluminum. Steel is steel. Silicon dioxide (glass) is silicon dioxide. You melt them down, blow off the impurities, and you are exactly back where you started -- and I mean right down to the molecule. The idea that somehow the Fe atoms that are part of your 2006 Ford car door might be "degraded" because they were once part of the trunk of a '56 Ford, and before that formed the bearing on a pushrod in a locomotive built in 1908, is inconsistent with basic principles of chemistry. (Biological recycling is even more efficient -- your food doesn't taste faintly of shit if the farmer manures the field.)

The only place you could make this kind of general argument is for composite polymer materials -- e.g. plastics, rubber and paper -- where it's not economical to reduce the materials to their original chemical form. Practically speaking, you can't reduce polystyrene waste to the olefins from which it was originally polymerized, in order to purge it of impurities, restore the original degree of polymerization, and restore the original composite mix of resin, plasticizers, et cetera. It just costs too much, as someone else has pointed out. So these materials are not, at present, significantly recycleable in any meaningful sense.

Instead, as in TFA, one "recycles" materials like these only in the toy sense of taking the used material and shaping it into another form for a while. It's as if you took your old, rusted-out car body, and, rather than melt the steel down and recast it into a pristine rust-free new car body, just turned the rustbucket into a planter, or some funky rust art. Or like my grandfather re-using wood from packing crates to stake up his tomato plants. Or GIs in the Second World War wiping their asses with pages from Stars and Stripes.

I don't think this is true recycling. It hasn't a prayer of ever becoming a closed loop, where the material recycles more or less endlessly, and you just supply energy. Turning your rusted-out automobile into a planter doesn't solve the fundamental problem at all, because the planter's just going to go into the dump itself, soon enough. You haven't done squat to figure out a way to truly close the loop, to turn the worn-out product back into a brand new product of the same type and quality.

Such "recycling" is a gimmick, an abuse of language, which conveys the false impression that something much more useful is going on than really is. The fact that some miniscule fraction of bicycle tires could be re-used by consumers one more time, for a year or so, as part of a rubber bookbag, can have no serious impact on the problem of our waste stream. It's re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Does it matter? Sure. Effort spent re-arranging deck chairs could be better spent trying to plug holes below the waterline. When people hear about all this "recycling" they may figure, hey, plenty's being done, and pay less attention to efforts at genuine recycling. (For example, although steel is infinitely recycleable, and very economically, only about 60% of American steel cans are recycled. That's idiotic.) Toy solutions can easily delay and prevent real solutions.

In any case, the more interesting thing is that entrepreneurs are beginning to see the profit potential of recycling garbage.

Good grief. Are we to suppose engineers have been idiots until early in the 21st century? Any fool understands that if you can figure out a way to turn "garbage" (what you can buy cheap) into "product" (what you can sell dear), then profit follows as night follows day. Consequently, the history of technology is chock-o'-block full of engineers taking "waste" products and finding new, useful things to do with them. This isn't a new insight or development, it's as old as compost heaps.

One historical example, relevant here, is that our entire modern plastics industry is based around the

eWaste is ready to kill us, so it's better to mine

Ewaste is poisoning our water [abandonedstuff.com]. Each TV has a lot of lead, and my provinces' IT equipment collection program set to start in 2007 won't take TVs until 2008 at the earliest. It's good that some places are capitalizing now on all of our misfortune.
eWastecanada.ca [ewastecanada.ca] is a local business mining for gold.

Re:eWaste is ready to kill us, so it's better to m

2-10 lbs of lead?

I find that very difficult do believe. I mean that's 5-25 POUNDS of solder. What the hell are they doing in there?

The heaviest thing in a television set is the picture tube. Since it's big and filled with vacuum it must have very thick walls. Thick glass walls. I suppose they could be lead crystal glass tubes, but that would be needlessly expensive, and wouldn't leach into the water supply in any meaningful timescale anyway. The next heaviest thing is the hundreds of wrappings of thin copper wire. There is no reason to ever make thin copper wire out of lead. In fact, it's impossible.

That figure smacks of taking advantage of people's ignorance about a heavy rarely opened box in almost everyone's homes. There's gotta be some kind of term for abusing people's uncertainty about things to encourage fear to promote some kind of crazy agenda.

Re:eWaste is ready to kill us, so it's better to m

I suppose they could be lead crystal glass tubes ...

Bingo [wikipedia.org]. It's heavily leaded glass to absorb X-rays generated by the electron beams smashing into the aperture grille etc.

Recycling Slashdot

"'The sustainability and restoring of our environment are providing opportunities in many fields of small business,'"

I'm going to do my part and recycle all my comments from now on.

We don't need this

The Mr. Fusion [wikipedia.org] already produces 1.21 jiggawatts of electricity. They are about 18 years too late.

Breaking news: Profitability is good!

This is ridiculous. All this is is people finding a way to make money. Nothing new. It just so happens that they're using waste from other businesses. It has been happening in one form or another for as long as any semblance of free markets have existed. There's a niche, and people are filling it. These aren't people out to save the world. These are people out to save a buck, and the way that they do it happens to recycle scrap. Big fucking deal.

Creative opportunities in other people's junk

You mean other than eBay? ^_^

Old saying

Thus proving the age old adage that one man's trash is another man's VC funding.

I work with a nonprofit doing some of this...

Works on college move-outs. All the reusable trash thrown out -- clothes, furniture, random stuff -- gets collected, sorted, and sold back to students and the community in the fall, proceeds generally going to the groups (student groups, charities, etc.) that provided the labor. Called Dump and Run [dumpandrun.org]. You will realize that anyone with a sign on the street for "large yardsale" does not know what they're talking about when you sell several tons of stuff for thousands of dollars. The sales I've been involved with are talking about a dozen tons for over $5 grand and they're for a school of under 2000 undergrads.

He already makes money from the wrecked planet...

'The sustainability and restoring of our environment are providing opportunities in many fields of small business,' John Stayton, co-founder and director of the Green MBA program at San Francisco's New College of California.

Well, he already found his way to make money with his "Green MBA program". Although, I guess it's not really in the spirit of the message.

Only a slight tangent

I used to buy freight damaged medical supplies and we did ok for awhile.

i had a 3000+ sq ft warehouse full at one point but too many problems

Other wholesalers/retailers were only interested in the particular product number they normally used even if something was equal or simply a different package quantity.

Soon even the charities didnt want odd quantities or small lots, they wanted pallets of gloves and money. By that point all our excess had to be put in garbage.

Between storing it, sorting it and paying to throw away the truely damaged stuff (only like 10% but it adds up quick) and now paying to throw away the odd stuff we didnt have end users for (another 25%) it got too expensive to salvage anything :(

Now most of it goes in trash even tho more than half is perfectly useable merchandise that doesnt even need reprocessing :(

And for one of the other comments, we dont recycle computer stuff here either. I just called the waste co to ask what to do with CRT....just toss it in trash. We use an incinerator in this county, they burn CRTs ?!?

recycling is hard... :(

General recycling/waste should be under contract to prisons. It gets dumped and sorted there where they can pay em pennies and keepp ppl busy. Stuff could be disasembled and recycled more.

Oh well, i guess we will dig up the landfills someday when we need the raw materials bad enough.

Oh yeah, article was fairly lame like most. More dressing than meat and potatoes ;/

Recycled rubber sidewalks? Bad idea.

This silly idea for recycled sidewalks is totally stupid, it completely ignores the basic facts: you're not taking garbage out of the environment, you're just distributing it in different spots, like EVERYWHERE. So instead of old rubber rotting away in a massive pile in a dump, it's rotting away in everyone's front yard. I think this is infinitely LESS preferable to concrete, at least you can rip up old concrete, break it down into gravel, and use it to make NEW concrete, and even in a dump, concrete is totally inert. But a recycled rubber sidewalk is just going to decompose and end up as hydrocarbon pollution that enters the ground and groundwater. If you dispose of tires in a dump, maybe you can put it in a clay-lined dig, where the decomposition products won't run into the ground water, but if it's in everyone's front yard, it won't take long before the pollution ends up in the land, water, and in our bodies.

Back in the '80s...

Back in the '80s a business partner and I had a company that literally turned garbage into gold. We would deinstall old mini-computer installations. Minicomputers for those too young to remember were often larger than refrigerators and could have hundreds of circuit boards in them. We'd then pull the board from them and since the computers still had an installed base but few parts available sell the parts to 3rd party repair depots around the country. Whatever didn't sell got boxed up and sent by the ton to a smelter who would extract the gold, silver, copper, etc. Some circuit boards, NCR for instance, had every trace and ground plane gold plated many times thicker than the connectors on today's computers. The huge aluminum castings of disk drives (80 to 100 pounds each) were great scrap too.

Eventually the installed base of systems dried up. That's when my second career started...

Green Waste to Ethanol

FYI this company has done it on the small scale with pilot plants, and is poised to be the first on the market with commercially based cellulose to ethnol plants. This literally takes peoples trash and converts it to usable fuel. Kind of like Rumpelstiltskin in the energy world. http://www.bluefireethanol.com/?sd [bluefireethanol.com] I don't know about you guys, but I want to get a flex-fuel vehicle ASAP, gas is killing me! -=DG

AOL

Someone ought to let AOL [slashdot.org] know, it'd save them some digging...

I live next to a rubber recycling plant

They make mats cut to link together -> marcketed as shop mats, horse stall mats, etc. They also have Rolls of rubber spoolled for other manufacturers to process further. The junk they can't make in to anything is sold to run generators (converted to burn ground rubber instead of gasoline). It runs all the time, and smells a bit like rubber every once and a while. As for noise the train makes more noise than the rubber plant, as well as shaking the house. So good stuff, but I still like concrete better, you know they also can recycle asphalt?

What the EPA says about recycling

From http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/recycle. htm [epa.gov]

"In 1999, recycling and composting kept ~64 million tons of material from landfills and incinerators. Today, this country recycles 28 percent of its waste...

... 42 percent of paper, 40 percent of plastic drink bottles, 55 percent of aluminum cans, 57 percent of steel packaging, and 52 percent of appliances are now recycled."

It seems like the Baby Boom consumer generation has left us with a legacy of trash we are continuing to produce, and we should invest in the infrastructure to mine it. Sort of high-end dumpster diving. But there are problems:
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/paper.ht m [epa.gov]
Paper - "challenges facing recovered paper processors and manufacturers are: 1) contamination, 2) sorting, and 3) fiber degradation... inks, adhesives, food, and broken glass affect the quality of recycled paper... Office paper cannot be recycled with newspaper and maintain its fiber integrity." And then the EPA website lists nice benefits of recycled paper as well.

http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/tires/in dex.htm [epa.gov]
Tires: "There are at least 275 million scrap tires in stockpiles in the U.S. In addition, approximately 290 million scrap tires were generated in 2003. Markets now exist for about 80 percent of scrap tires--up from 17 percent in 1990."
Doing anything with tires other than puting them in a big pile is a good idea. Tire piles are a fire hazard and are a great place for culturing things like mosquitos, rats, and skunks. In addition, tires have a very poor packing efficiency and just take up a lot of space.

Garbage can go a long way

Currently all my city is doing with the methane that come from its garbage dumb is to burn it in order to reduce odors, but they are planning soon to add a generator, that will:

- get rid of a gaz that is 20 times worst than CO2 at creating the greenhouse effect
- generate electricity from a fuel that is free, and since the electricity is local, it reduces transmission line loses, and create local jobs.
- the heat generated will be used to heat a greenhouse during the winter, and so create jobs and reduce transportation fees and fuel.
- and create revenues for the city.

Not bad for something that was just a nuisance.

Wierdest thing

The wierdest thing I've ever done to a computer to make it work, and I am ashamed to admit it, is to put the Windows Operating System on it. I still don't know why it works once it's up, albeit there seems to be some hit or miss...

This is not recycling

Most of the things people consider to be recycling are actually *NOT*. Making rubber sidewalks from old tires is *DOWNCYCLING*. The process of making the sidewalks contaminates the rubber material so it can't be used again. What do we do with the rubber sidewalks when they are no good anymore? True recycling would turn those old tires back into tires again. Making the tire companies responsible for deposit, return and recycling services for thier product (back into tires again) would be more to the point. Perhaps we would then see tire technology change so that the product could be remanufactured easily. The same goes for fabrics made from old plastic milk bottles. What do you do with the rags when they are not of use again? Sooner or later downcycled stuff ends up in the landfill. It's better to make materials from renewable sources that break down without landfilling. ie: instead of styrene foams use silica ceramic foams. The problem is energy and the cost of production for these newer materials. You may save landfill space but you burn huge amounts of energy to produce them.

Wow, competition for garbage

In addition to recycling garbage directly into other products such as sidewalks, we also have the high temperature plants that convert it into diesel. And then there's the reuse movement - a shopping bag becomes a garbage can liner, etc. You have to look at this as an evolution of the human economy in a positive direction.

Photochemical waste to silver and fertilizer

As an added note a company called Itronics (ITRO) takes photochemical waste and turns it into silver bars and fertilizer for farms. Pretty interesting company. http://www.itronics.com/ [itronics.com]

Chemicals.

My brother used to work for a company that would:

- check out the waste-chemicals of a plant.
- evaluate what might be of use.
- offer to dispose of the interesting chemicals, cheaper than the normal waste-processing of those chemicals would cost.
- Sell the chemicals where someone else needs them!

They would get money on both ends: both getting the goods, as well as getting rid of them. There might be a refining step in the middle, usually cheap enough not to spoil the fun....

Re:I hate to be the sad sack here,

but what these people are doing is not recycling. What they are doing is delaying the inevitable.

That's really just two ways of saying the same thing. And in any case, isn't delaying the inevitable a worthwhile thing to do? The more slowly the landfills fill, the more time we have to come up with a way to solve the problem.

When that happens, we will have the same volume of trash as we started with.

No matter what happens (barring space exploration, and meteorites, anyway), we will always have the same volume of stuff that we started with: one Earth-sized planet's worth of various materials, mixed into various combinations that are either more useful to us, or less useful to us. The trick is to increase our skill at converting the less-useful forms (aka "garbage") into more-useful forms (aka "products"). This is a step along that path.