Non – Hazardous wastes
About the recyclables
A lot of wastes can be recycled into new products, such as metals, plastics, paper, cardboard, rubber,
motor oils, etc. However, it is important to be mentioned that, recycling process needs two main requirements:
- Clean wastes – without water, food, cooking oil, dirt, chemicals, hazardous substances or other contaminants!
- Defined waste fractions – without mixing the different types of wastes, but only separated paper and cardboard, PET, HDPE, PP, aluminum, ferrous metals, copper, mineral oils, etc. Some recyclables needs to be defined even by color, like the plastics and glass.
If these requirements are not fulfilled, the wastes cannot be recycled, or the recycled product will have bad quality, too high treatment cost or even can be dangerous – for example if plastic wastes
contaminated with hazardous substances are mixed with the clean plastics waste! In such cases, the waste should not be recycled but energy recovered!
Depending on the waste type, there are different recycling processes consisting of different steps, such as:
- Sorting / segregation / filtering
- Shredding
- Washing
- Drying
- Heating / melting
- Molding / rolling / pressing
Each process step, requires energy and resources, so the environmental impact have to be carefully evaluated!
Recycled plastic granulate
About the non – recyclables
Industry and household generates a lot of waste types, which cannot be recycled, such as:
- Composites like laminated paper, tetrapack, multi layer products, etc.
- Mixed wastes (from MSW and commercial sources) like undersize or low-quality (contaminated or dirty) plastics, cardboard and paper, textiles, rubber, and others.
- Packaging like colored and laminated foils.
- Recycling by-products like textile (from tires and textile recycling), foam, leather and plastics (from vehicles dismantling).
- Different types of sludges, solvents, glues and resins.
Typically, the best solution for such non-recyclable wastes is to be converted into high quality alternative fuels and used in energy intensive industries, where the generated heat or electricity will be used for new products.
Recycling does not compete with the energy recovery! Depending on the energy intensiveness of the recycling process, sometimes recycling can be less environmentally friendly than the energy recovery. That’s why careful assessment of the total energy input and benefits of certain process needs to be done.
As well, in some processes, the energy recovery (cement and lime) is considered as recycling – for example in cement industry when metals (ferrous, alumina content) and ashes (silica and lime content) are incorporated into the new product (clinker).
Textile from tire recycling