Recycling household waste

Separation of plastics such as from household waste and use as reducing agent in blast furnaces or for feedstock recycling... 

Recycling of certain household waste, such as televisions, computers, and rechargeable batteries, is desirable to control toxic pollution. Televisions are a significant source of lead that can leach into groundwater from dump sites. 

Recycling is the process of collecting waste, sorting it, and reclaiming raw materials that can be sold to produce products. From our household waste, glass and metals have been recycled for decades in many parts of the United States. Automobiles have been extensively recycled in North America for many years. Approximately 75% of the mass of an average scrap car is recycled. Clearly this is a profitable business with an extensive infrastruc-... 

Waste plastics are primarily generated by small-to-medium-size enterprises and households. Therefore, it is preferable to build chemical plants for the recycling of waste... 

To recover a maximum of olefins and butadiene from recycling polyolefins, it is necessary to have a short residence time of the product gases in the fluidized bed zone to avoid no secondary reactions. The pyrolysis gas should not be circulated and used as fluidizing gas. For the experiments, steam was used as fluidizing gas [13, 14]. An easy separation of the hydrocarbon products is possible by condensation to water in a cooler. The results are shown in Table 17.6. As feedstock a light plastic fraction from household waste separation was used which contains 95.8% of PE and PP, 3% of PS, and 0.2% of PVC. 

The capacity of liquefaction is less than that of other techniques since its tender price has been the highest in these as shown in Section 5. However, liquefaction has come into effect in the Plastic Recycling Law, since the Niigata liquefaction plant has demonstrated for the first time in these feedstock techniques, that such mixed and complicated household waste plastics were recyclable as pyrolysis oil. 

This waste plastics pyrolysis process has been developed by Toshiba Corporation, and a plant with 14 800 tons annnal capacity of household waste plastics was constructed in Sapporo by Toshiba Corporation (Figure 26.6). The plant has been in operation since April 2000 by Sapporo Plastics Recycling Co., Ltd (hereinafter SPR) with investment by TERM Corporation, Toshiba Corporation, MITSUI Co., Ltd. and Sapporo City Government. 

The waste plastics utilized at the SPR plant are the household waste plastics specified by the Containers Packaging Recycling Law and marked as recyclable on the each of the products. The waste plastics are discharged at curbside by residents once per week, and collected, sorted, compacted in bale form by the local government, which then snpplies the SPR plant. 

Some quantitative data regarding the contaminant concentrations in household waste fractions are available. In the paper and cardboard fraction, the quantities of heavy metals are relatively low compared to the total contamination by heavy metals in the total municipal waste stream. Newspapers, for example, contain very low concentrations of heavy metals compared to magazines, the color print of which contains heavy metals. Data from the National Household Waste Analysis conducted in Germany are listed in Table 9.2. The data reflect results that the separate collection of recyclables has on the concentrations of heavy metals and halogens in individual recyclable fractions and in the remaining waste steam. Before being mixed with the other waste, the organic fraction of household waste is as low as the fraction of... 

Worm composters recycle 70% of household waste. WWW.homeharvest.com www.composters.com... 

Individual countries within the European Community handle the battery waste problem differently. For example, in Switzerland all used consumer batteries are considered hazardous waste and must be collected separately from ordinary household waste. Batteries must be recycled or stored in warehouses, not landfilled. A tax is collected on all new battery purchases to help defray the cost of recycling. In Italy, spent dry batteries are considered as hazardous waste and must be collected separately. In Sweden (10), the environmental issues relatii to waste batteries are addressed in the Control of Chemicals Bill and in the Decree on Environmentally Hazardous Batteries. All used batteries containing cadmium or mercury are collected separately under government control. The cadmium is then recycled. Regulations are in place for the manufacture of nickel/cadmium cells, limiting the exposure of workers and the emission of toxic materials. 

Only a minute fraction, about 0.1%, of the total lead consumed by the battery industry enters into the manufacture of small consumer type lead-acid batteries, and they are likely to be discarded as part of general household waste. The recycling of batteries in that category may be handled by processes described in Section 5.3 below. Almost all the leadf consumed by the battery industry is employed in the manufacture of large prismatic automotive and industrial type batteries. 

An interesting recycling process has been developed the Recytec company in Switzerland in cooperation with ETH in Zurich (25). It combines an initial thermal treatment with a subsequent electrochemical process to recover separated metal values from spent household batteries. A virtue of the process is that it accepts unsorted mixtures of just about all types of batteries likely to be found in household wastes, and it can probably tolerate admixtures of some non-battery wastes as well. Although it is not designed to handle lead-acid batteries, it may well be capable of doing so after some process modifications. 

Bauer and Herrmann (1997) reported that di- -butyl phthalate was present in the leachate from various fractions of household wastes from the regions of Bayreuth and Straubling in Germany. The wastes included food waste, paper for recycling, unusable paper, cardboard, plastic films, other plastics, textiles,... 

Household waste and similar Material and organic recycling rate 37% in 2013 45% in 2015 60% in 2020... 

S. Serranti, L. Valentina et al.. An innovative recycling process to obtain pure polyethylene and polypropylene fiom household waste. Waste Manag. 35, 12-20 (2015)... 

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