Do you know that millions of families still live in the dark? MyShelter Foundation aims to brighten up one million homes in the Philippines by 2012.
According to statistics from the National Electrification Commission in 2009, 3 million households still remain powerless outside Metro Manila. And even in the metro, families still continue to live in darkness. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) has reported that a large number of fire- related incidents involve faulty electrical connections. Informal settlements are high-risk areas, since the BFP does not conduct fire hazard inspections in these communities. MyShelter envisions sharing to unprivileged communities an economically- and ecologically-sustainable source of light that will provide an immediate solution to our fellowmen’s problems.
Less than 10% of plastic trash is recycled — compared to almost 90% of metals — because of the massively complicated problem of finding and sorting the different kinds. Frustrated by this waste, Mike Biddle has developed a cheap and incredibly energy efficient plant that can, and does, recycle any kind of plastic.
Here is the transcript…
I’m a garbage man. And you might find it interesting that I became a garbage man, because I absolutely hate waste. I hope, within the next 10 minutes, to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life. And I’d like to start at the very beginning. Think back when you were just a kid. How did look at the stuff in your life? Perhaps it was like these toddler rules: It’s my stuff if I saw it first. The entire pile is my stuff if I’m building something. The more stuff that’s mine, the better. And of course, it’s your stuff if it’s broken.
Well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry, it’s become pretty clear to me that we don’t necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults. And let me tell you why I have that perspective. Because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people’s discarded stuff. Now a million pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff, but it’s a tiny drop of the durable goods that are disposed each and every year around the world — well less than one percent. In fact, the United Nations estimates that there’s about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year — and that’s one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream. And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth, that number well more than doubles. And of course, the more developed the country, the bigger these mountains.
Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage. We see above-ground mines. And the reason we see mines is because there’s a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place. And it’s becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams. Because as we’ve heard all week at TED, the world’s getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff. And of course, they want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted.
And what goes into making those toys and tools that we use every single day? It’s mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals. And the metals, we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world. And the plastics, we get from oil, which we go to more remote locations and drill ever deeper wells to extract. And these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we’re already starting to see today.
The good news is we are starting to recover materials from our end-of-life stuff and starting to recycle our end-of-life stuff, particularly in regions of the world like here in Europe that have recycling policies in place that require that this stuff be recycled in a responsible manner. Most of what’s extracted from our end-of-life stuff, if it makes it to a recycler, are the metals. To put that in perspective — and I’m using steel as a proxy here for metals, because it’s the most common metal — if your stuff makes it to a recycler, probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose. Plastics are a whole other story: well less than 10 percent are recovered. In fact, it’s more like five percent. Most of it’s incinerated or landfilled.
Now most people think that’s because plastics are a throw-away material, have very little value. But actually, plastics are several times more valuable than steel. And there’s more plastics produced and consumed around the world on a volume basis every year than steel. So why is such a plentiful and valuable material not recovered at anywhere near the rate of the less valuable material? Well it’s predominantly because metals are very easy to recycle from other materials and from one another. They have very different densities. They have different electrical and magnetic properties. And they even have different colors. So it’s very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials. Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range. They have either identical or very similar electrical and magnetic properties. And any plastic can be any color, as you probably well know. So the traditional ways of separating materials just simply don’t work for plastics.
Another consequence of metals being so easy to recycle by humans is that a lot of our stuff from the developed world — and sadly to say, particularly from the United States, where we don’t have any recycling policies in place like here in Europe — finds its way to developing countries for low-cost recycling. People, for as little as a dollar a day, pick through our stuff. They extract what they can, which is mostly the metals — circuit boards and so forth — and they leave behind mostly what they can’t recover, which is, again, mostly the plastics. Or they burn the plastics to get to the metals in burn houses like you see here. And they extract the metals by hand. Now while this may be the low-economic-cost solution, this is certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution. I call this environmental arbitrage. And it’s not fair, it’s not safe and it’s not sustainable.
Now because the plastics are so plentiful — and by the way, those other methods don’t lead to the recovery of plastics, obviously — but people do try to recover the plastics. This is just one example. This is a photo I took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in Mumbai, India. They store the plastics on the roofs. They bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these, and people try very hard to separate the plastics, by color, by shape, by feel, by any technique they can. And sometimes they’ll resort to what’s known as the “burn and sniff” technique where they’ll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic. None of these techniques result in any amount of recycling in any significant way. And by the way, please don’t try this technique at home.
So what are we to do about this space-age material, at least what we used to call a space-aged material, these plastics? Well I certainly believe that it’s far too valuable and far too abundant to keep putting back in the ground or certainly send up in smoke. So about 20 years ago, I literally started in my garage tinkering around, trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other, and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends, in the mining world actually, and in the plastics world, and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world. Because after all, we’re doing above-ground mining. And we eventually broke the code. This is the last frontier of recycling. It’s the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the Earth. And we finally figured out how to do it. And in the process, we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics.
The traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals. You breakdown the molecules, you recombine them in very specific ways, to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day. We said, there’s got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics. And not just sustainable from an environmental standpoint, sustainable from an economic standpoint as well. Well a good place to start is with waste. It certainly doesn’t cost as much as oil, and it’s plentiful, as I hope that you’ve been able to see from the photographs. And because we’re not breaking down the plastic into molecules and recombining them, we’re using a mining approach to extract the materials.
We have significantly lower capital costs in our plant equipment. We have enormous energy savings. I don’t know how many other projects on the planet right now can save 80 to 90 percent of the energy compared to making something the traditional way. And instead of plopping down several hundred million dollars to build a chemical plant that will only make one type of plastic for its entire life, our plants can make any type of plastic we feed them. And we make a drop-in replacement for that plastic that’s made from petrochemicals. Our customers get to enjoy huge CO2 savings. They get to close the loop with their products. And they get to make more sustainable products.
In the short time period I have, I want to show you a little bit of a sense about how we do this. It starts with metal recyclers who shred our stuff into very small bits. They recover the metals and leave behind what’s called shredder residue — it’s their waste — a very complex mixture of materials, but predominantly plastics. We take out the things that aren’t plastics, such as the metals they missed, carpeting, foam, rubber, wood, glass, paper, you name it. Even an occasional dead animal, unfortunately. And it goes in the first part of our process here, which is more like traditional recycling. We’re sieving the material, we’re using magnets, we’re using air classification. It looks like the Willy Wonka factory at this point.
At the end of this process, we have a mixed plastic composite: many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics. This goes into the more sophisticated part of our process, and the really hard work, multi-step separation process begins. We grind the plastic down to about the size of your small fingernail. We use a very highly automated process to sort those plastics, not only by type, but by grade. And out the end of that part of the process come little flakes of plastic: one type, one grade. We then use optical sorting to color sort this material. We blend it in 50,000-lb. blending silos. We push that material to extruders where we melt it, push it through small die holes, make spaghetti-like plastic strands. And we chop those strands into what are called pellets. And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry. This is the same material that you would get from oil. And today, we’re producing it from your old stuff, and it’s going right back into your new stuff.
So now, instead of your stuff ending up on a hillside in a developing country or literally going up in smoke, you can find your old stuff back on top of your desk in new products, in your office, or back at work in your home. And these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic, replacing virgin plastic, to make their new products.
So I hope I’ve changed the way you look at at least some of the stuff in your life. We took our clues from mother nature. Mother nature wastes very little, reuses practically everything. And I hope that you stop looking at yourself as a consumer — that’s a label I’ve always hated my entire life — and think of yourself as just using resources in one form, until they can be transformed to another form for another use later in time. And finally, I hope you agree with me to change that last toddler rule just a little bit to: “If it’s broken, it’s my stuff.”
During October, Surfrider’s Rise Above Plastic (RAP) initiative is teaming up with clothing brand Rusty to celebrate Raptoberfest. They’ll be sharing plastic-related facts, as well as tips on how to reduce your own plastic footprint.
A little over 25 years ago three people in Malibu, California found out that their favorite wave was about to be destroyed. Think about that for a second.
Think about something you love… something that gives you enjoyment. Taken away.
First Point, pictured to the right, the quintessential perfect, California wave was about to be destroyed. Those three people organized and worked with the local municipalities until they were satisfied that their efforts to preserve that iconic wave would be successful.
We’re always on the lookout for creative ways to reduce kill the use of plastic in innovative ways. We’ve found 3 examples we just have to share – an event, a city and a school:
At the Montréal Jazz Fesitival, the organization invited Fontaine Nayaa water-bottle refilling service from Quebec-based Naya Waters designed to minimize plastic waste. For an affordable price (CAN$1.50) event patrons could simply refill their water bottles and stay hydrated while doing good for the planet. Public, outdoor events are huge consumers of plastic water bottles, this jazz festival has been carbon-neutral 2008 but this past summer they focused on water and reducing plastic consumption and trash. Their success, we hope, will inspire other event organizers to consider a water refilling stations to keep their crowds healthy and hydrated.
TapIt is a community program that enables people to refill their water bottles at participating cafés, completely free of charge in, and around, New York City (and now San Francisco and Washington, DC!). For the water-totting crowds in this city, the goal of this program is to help people stay healthy and hydrated without relying on single-use plastic bottles. And it’s so easy – restaurant or café with a soda dispenser or tap that gives clean drinking water can sign up as a partner. Thirsty consumers can find taps online or via TapIt’s iPhone app, and are provided with information on the type of water that’s available, telling discerning customers whether the water’s filtered or non-filtered, room temperature or chilled. How great is that?
In Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, the Kingswood Regional High Schooland Middle School a recently rebuilt middle and high school go beyond LEED certification, and for the coveted CHPS certification. Aside from new synthetic and natural turf athletic fields as well as a Geothermal Ground Heat Exchanger piping system to serve the entire campus, the new school takes advantage of natural light, LED lighting when needed, energy sensors and other energy-saving efforts. But what really stood out to us? They have been smart enough to include reusable water bottle refilling stations right by the traditional water fountains on campus. Through their efforts, they are teaching the next generation the importance, the beauty, and the need to be green in our personal and public environments.
We’re so impressed that people, communities, events and even whole cities are finding ways to encourage people to stop using single-use plastic
bottles and reuse environmentally-friendly water bottles. Now you’ve got access to water, and we’ve built the only reusable glass water bottle made from a minimum of 75% post-consumer recycled glass and ZERO plastic.
Share with us, what do you do to minimize your use of single-use plastics?
For Recycle Glass Month, I decided to find what we Americans could learn from the best practices in glass recycling from our friendly neighbors overseas. While we’re making strides, we can learn a lesson or two through these 5 examples:
In Denmark 98% of glass bottles are refillable and 98% of those are returned by consumers. Set a community, city, state or national goal and then boast the good numbers.
Glass collection points, known as Bottle Banks are very common near shopping centres, at civic amenity sites and in local neighborhoods in the United Kingdom. They opened the first one 34 years ago in 1977 and now more than 50,000 Bottle Banks are around the country. Make glass recycling convenient by putting in collection points in more places instead of only relying on curbside programs alone.
Recycling Bins in the United Kingdom
In Switzerland, bottle banks at every supermarket, with separate slots for clear, green and brown glass. But the Swiss take it further, there is a strong financial incentive. Recycling is free, but in most parts of Switzerland throwing away trash costs money – each trash bag has to have a sticker on it, and each sticker costs at
least 1 euro (60 pence). So the less you throw out, the less you pay and hence the incentive to recycle. You’ll like this: No sticker? Then the trash will be left outside your house to rot. And how well does it work? Take a look at plastic PET bottles which are the most common drinks containers in Switzerland, and 80% of them are recycled – far higher than the European average of 20 to 40%. Include financial incentives that reward people for recycling and reducing waste going into our landfills. Or financial disincentives for those that trash materials that could be easily recycled.
Germans, already known for their organization and dedication to the environment, boast that around 90% of Germans are willing to sort out their rubbish and do so. Germany offers color-coded recycle bins for paper, glass, plastic, metals, bio (food waste), packaging and then a black box for materials that cannot be recycled. Good design matters. Use colors and/or shapes to help consumers more easily sort their recycled materials. If people are willing to sort their trash, make it easy for them to do so.
Spain targets companies that use glass in their products. Spanish law demands that food and drink companies must pay for the cost of recycling the glass that their products are sold in. This gives a thriving market for private companies to specialize in glass collection, sorting and re-processing. While there are lots of ways to boost consumers to be more environmentally-responsible. Consider financial incentives for companies to source, reclaim and recycle the content they use in packaging their products.
What else you think we could do to boost glass recycling in the U.S.?
