How to save a world overwhelmed by plastic waste?

The earth will be flooded by electronic waste

Mobile phones, cameras, computers, televisions, cars... I don’t know if you have noticed that we are already surrounded by all kinds of electronic products. And have you ever thought that as electronic products become more and more popular and are updated faster and faster, e-waste has become the largest and most troublesome source of pollution in the 21st century?

According to data released by the United Nations University on April 19, 41.8 million tons of e-waste were produced globally in 2014. It is expected that by 2018, the amount of e-waste generated will reach 50 million tons. E-waste has become a The fastest growing solid waste! Some scientists predict that in the next 10 years, the world will be in danger of being overwhelmed by electronic waste!

So, the recycling of electronic waste is very necessary. However, less than 1/6 of the total amount of e-waste is recycled through formal channels every year, and the metal is mainly recycled. People are basically helpless to deal with the remaining plastic. For example, Guiyu Town in the southwest of Shantou City, Guangdong Province, my country, is a world-famous electronic waste disposal site, with an annual processing capacity of more than 3 million tons. However, almost all of them are simple manual operations, mainly recycling the metal inside: some are burned in the open air. Wires are used to recover the copper inside; some use acid to corrode circuit boards by the river to recover trace amounts of gold inside.

In fact, throughout the recycling community, "mixed plastics" (everything except beverage bottles, milk jugs, and plastic bags) have always been considered a dead end, with only a small number of plastics in high-end products. For example, computer casings are recycled and processed into low-end products such as flower pots and sewers (the so-called downcycling). The final fate of most plastics is to be landfilled, incinerated, or directly dumped into the ocean.

Why is it so difficult to recycle plastic?

The biggest challenge facing plastic recycling is how to "save" the target plastics from the garbage dump, because there are all kinds of strange things in the garbage, including construction waste, industrial waste, domestic waste, etc., etc. Packaging foam, rubber tires, animal carcasses...the most troublesome thing is rubber. The black rubber tube looks like plastic, but if it is accidentally mixed with recycled plastic, the manufactured products will be defective.

The task of “rescuing” plastic is not an easy one. Plastic is not like metal, because metal density, color, conductivity and magnetism are different, so it is easy to distinguish. However, the density of different plastics overlaps, and the electrical and magnetic properties are almost the same. Color standards are even more undesirable, because any type of plastic can is any color, therefore many screening criteria and experiences from the metal recycling industry cannot be used for reference.

In addition to type, plastics must also be distinguished by performance, because the fillers in plastics with different functions are different: non-flammable plastics contain flame retardants; biodegradable plastics contain starch and polylactic acid, etc. .

It can be seen that plastic waste is difficult to separate and is a hot potato that no one wants to touch. But an American guy named Mike Biddle solved this problem perfectly! As a chemical engineer, Biddle had previously been engaged in the research and development of plastic products, but after realizing the huge harm caused by plastics to the environment and humans, he resolutely switched to studying how to recycle plastics. Biddle's goal is to recycle the top five plastics used to make durable goods: ABS (acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene polymer), HIPS (high-impact polystyrene), HDPE (high-density polyethylene), and PP (polypropylene) and filled polypropylene.

So how did Biddle make these five types of plastics perfectly reborn?

Looking for solutions

“In order to solve this problem, I invested 150 million US dollars and spent 20 years.” Biddle once told reporters.

In 1992, Biddle quit his previous high-paying job, established his own company, MBA Polymers, and began to focus on studying plastic recycling issues. During this period, Biddle noticed and became friends with the British Ray Mann, the largest e-waste recycler in Europe at the time. Mann's method of recycling plastics is to first determine the type of plastic one by one, that is, first sort it into categories and then crush and reshape it. Although the efficiency is very low, the quality of its recycled plastics has been recognized by large companies such as IBM.

Biddle believes that such identification and sorting one by one is too time-consuming and laborious, and automated batch processing cannot be realized. He believes that if the plastics are first crushed and then separated, large-scale automated production can be achieved. Mann felt that Biddle's method was too simple and crude, and it was simply a joke. But not long after, Biddle succeeded. It seemed that the truth was indeed in the hands of a few people.

Now MBA Company has more than 60 patented technologies. Although the details of these plastic separation technologies are commercial secrets and we have no chance to see them, we can still peep into their main processes.

The first is crushing. Used cars, computers and other electronic waste were all thrown into the "bloody mouth" of the three-story-high crusher. The giant "monster" spits steam from its mouth and roars like thunder. It rolls the swallowed electronic waste into "pancakes" and then sends them to the hammer crusher. The hammer mill can eat 220 tons of "pancakes" per hour, and its 400-pound hammer can "chew" everything into small pieces.

Then, the hot fragments passed under a powerful magnet on the conveyor belt. The steel and iron in the fragments were sucked out by the magnet and sent into a special channel.

The remaining fragments continue to move forward and enter the next stop - the eddy current sorting machine. The eddy current sorting machine has a round belly. After being energized, it will generate a constantly changing magnetic field. When non-ferrous metals enter the magnetic field, it will generate an opposite magnetic field. In this way, the non-ferrous metals will be spit out by the sorting machine due to the repulsion of the magnetic field. Enter different teleport slots.

Let plastics be reborn

Before Biddle, people’s recycling work stopped here. They only collected metals from discarded electrical appliances, and the remaining plastics, foams, rubbers, etc. were all recycled Straight to landfill or incineration, but Biddle goes further down this path. The mostly plastic, non-metallic fragments continue their journey to an inclined graded platform, where the lighter fragments are blown off the platform by a fan, while the heavier fragments remain on the platform. The grading platform vibrates so that the heavier pieces roll down the slope, while the lighter pieces stay on top.

Next, the mixed fragments began to take various "bubble baths". The "bath liquid" used surfactants, and each plastic has its own dedicated bath liquid, such as PP. Surfactants will only adhere to the surface of PP. With the help of surfactants, the bubbles in the pool adhere to the surface of the target plastic, causing it to float and separate from other materials. After a round of bubble bath, the plastic fragments not only become clean and smooth, but different types of plastic are also screened and separated.

Next, the same type of plastic is fed into a photoelectric detector that recognizes a certain color and groups pieces of the same color together. For example, a blue light detector directs an air gun to remove all non-blue pieces from the mix. "Boom" out, leaving only blue fragments.

In this way, after entering this maze of machines and conveyor belts and going through dozens of separation processes, the mixed plastics were successfully separated by type and color. Finally, different types of plastic are put into different stainless steel silos, melted and processed into thin strips like vermicelli, and finally cut into tiny particles.

These small plastic pellets are what Biddle sells to customers, and their quality is almost comparable to new plastic. It is no exaggeration to say that Biddle’s plastic recycling technology has transformed discarded plastics into a new life. MBA is currently the only company in the world that can regenerate waste plastics. Global food giant Nestlé and global home appliance giant Electrolux both use recycled plastics produced by MBA. Biddle has also successfully sold recycled plastics to IBM and other world companies. level electronics company.

More importantly, the energy consumption of producing recycled plastic is only 10% of that of producing new plastic! It is estimated that more than 100 million tons of plastic are discarded globally every year. If these plastics can be recycled, the consumption and dependence on oil (the raw material for the production of new plastics) can be greatly reduced and the oil crisis can be effectively alleviated. This will not only affect oil prices and change the direction of global trade, but also greatly reduce the harm of electronic waste to places such as Asia and Africa. "There is no garbage in the world, only misplaced treasures." If Biddle can convince people to hand over their electronic waste to him instead of littering it all over the world, he can change the world!

The road to plastic rebirth is full of twists and turns

The ideal is full, but the reality is very skinny. The magical plastic recycling technology has not received the attention and support it deserves. Biddle’s plastic recycling The road has been hard.

As early as the end of the last century, Biddle was already quite confident in his technology. High-spirited and smug, he decided to leave the laboratory and start large-scale production. Biddle successfully found investors and established a processing plant in Richmond, California, USA. In 2000, the plant was put into full production. But the good times did not last long, and Biddle soon discovered that the factory could not obtain enough electronic waste. For this reason, he had to suspend production and transform the factory into a research base. There are not enough raw materials not because there is less electronic waste in the United States, but because the United States lacks laws to force recycling and prohibit their export. The raw materials Biddle needs are exported to countries such as China and India, because such processing methods are more costly. Low.

In desperation, Biddle decided to build factories in other countries. Initially, he tried to cooperate with Japan, which already had laws requiring large-scale mandatory recycling of used electrical appliances. However, the construction of the factory in Japan was not going well, so he began to consider China, the world's largest e-waste distribution center. Although China does not have laws regarding mandatory recycling, there are companies interested in Biddle's technology.

In 2003, after the chairman of Guangzhou Iron and Steel Group got acquainted with Biddle, he keenly realized that this was a real opportunity to solve the problem of e-waste recycling, and there was huge economic value behind it, so decisively invited Biddle to build a factory in China. At the same time, the Chinese government also began to encourage the recycling of plastics in e-waste, so in 2004, Biddle came to Guangzhou with his plastic recycling technology and funds, and cooperated with Guangzhou Iron and Steel Group to establish Guangzhou Iron and Steel MBA Plastic New Technology Company (referred to as Guangzhou Iron and Steel Group). MBAPC). Although MBAPC's current average annual waste disposal volume is only 32,000 tons, which is only a drop in the bucket compared to my country's annual e-waste disposal volume of more than 2.6 million tons, it is a good start.

In 2006 and 2010, Biddle established factories in Austria and the United Kingdom. Now, MBA can process 125,000 tons of e-waste every year, but because people still have insufficient understanding of plastic recycling, the shortage of raw materials still plagues Biddle. Biddle hopes that countries can correctly realize the significance of plastic recycling to the world's economy, energy and environment as soon as possible, so that plastic recycling technology can be more widely used. So I believe that in the near future, "garbage disposal sites" like Guiyu Town in Guangdong, my country will no longer exist, and the earth will be able to escape the risk of being overwhelmed by electronic waste.