"Recycling: yes or not?"

Hi bloggers!

After a while, it is now time to complete the “Recycling: yes or not?” discussion. That will roughly take two more posts, I promise.

The conclusion of the last post introduces what I am going to talk about today: in the next paragraphs, I will analyze the remaining disposal methods. In order to do that, these posts will be mainly based on the “Environmental benefits of recycling – update 2010“ report, edited by the Waste & Resource Action Program (WRAP – www.wrap.org.uk). This document runs a clear excursus across all the waste treatment methods, highlighting the best disposal solution for every different type of waste. Moreover, it is focused on the Municipal Solid Waste and, obviously, it analyzes also landfilling and incineration. Considering that these two disposal options have been already discussed, I will be mostly talking about Composting, Anaerobic Digestion and Pyrolysis in comparison to recycling.

Before analyzing in detail the contents of this report, I would like to get started with a significant sentences available in the summary (page 1):

“The conclusion was clear – most studies show that recycling offers more environmental benefits and lower environmental impacts than the other waste management options”.

Right, the scheme followed by the report is structured according to the different type of waste. For the first one, cardboard, it is shown that landfilling, incineration and recycling are the most common treatment. Same consideration can be found in other works like Arena et al. (2004). As well as WRAP report, the authors actually note that for paper, incineration could be sometimes better that recycling because it allows higher ratios in terms of energy recovery. Considering instead both the water usage (quite high for incineration) and energy request, recycling seems to be the best option. In 2014, Bajpai totally promoted paper recycling instead: indeed, his work points out how paper produced from recycled material requires less energy, prevent virgin material employment and reduce environmental pollution (Bajpai 2004). 

Same conclusions have been traced by a Swedish study. Herein, the authors show how "the potential saving that can be made when going from incineration to recycling is 1.2 million ton CO2 -equivalents" (Finnveden et al. 2005: 225).

Concerning plastics, recycling is overall ranked as the best option in terms of climate change (low impact), energy demand as well as water request (low as for paper). Pyrolysis is also considered as a preferred disposal methods because it is the treatment that shows the lowest toxics effects on human health.

Also Quian et al. (2014) promoted the pyrolysis process: considering before the advantages of recycling, as it helps to protect the environment and reduce the use of natural resources, they illustrated that, with its considerable heating value (Kiran et al. 2000), plastic represents the right ingredient to produce a more calorific fuel.

The problem of recycling plastic consists in its costs: how explained by Eriksson et al. (2005), recycling plastics presents the lowest consequences but, at the same time, the highest outlay. However, the same study explains how the general term “recycling” means reducing the environmental impact as well as softening the demand of energy resources and also limiting the economic expenses.

Anaerobic digestion (AD) and composting are taken into account especially when food and organic waste are involved but this, with few more important bits, will be the topic of the last "Recycling: yes or not" post.

See you soon on RE-cycling!