Waste treatment & recycling
Waste treatment and recycling is a major issue worldwide and only starts to receive the attention it deserves.
Today, more than 10% of the world shipping cargo is said to be waste, often toxic, bound for unclear destinations. Often illegally, most will end in developing countries.
Fortunately, regulatory pressure is increasing and the various activities included in waste treatments and recycling meet a steadily growing demand. As a consequence, the technologies and monitoring systems involved are getting more sophisticated.
The prime motive of developing recycling technologies is to increase the recycling rate and shift the focus away from dumping or incineration to adding value.
Waste needs to be sorted prior to treatment. Sorting technologies are being developed and companies investing in these technologies may also be attractive investment opportunities for ECT Fund.
ECT Fund splits Waste Treatment and Recycling into two categories:
- Regular waste
- Toxic waste
3.1. Regular Waste
In developed countries, domestic waste consists of an average of 2~3 Kg per person and per day. It includes paper (34%), scrap food (12%), garden and external waste (10%), plastics (12%), metals (8%), rubber, textiles, glass (9%), wood (5%) and others (5%). The efficient sorting of papers, metals and glass could facilitate recycling of almost half of domestic wastes. If sorting is done at source, recycling rates can be increase. Norway and Japan highlight the behavioural changes taking place amongst households as increasing levels of sorting occur at home.
Nevertheless, in the EU today's recycling rate for paper and cardboard is just about 50% (but over 80 % for newspapers), and only 25% for glass containers!
Recycling process can either be reverse logistic or towards a different product than the original one and which usually has a positive market value. In the case of reverse logistics, the original product is reproduced and sold.
The sorting techniques used at the waste sorting facilities are simple and robust, but not very precise. For example, density sorting systems usually involve air classifiers, which split waste from light to heavy components. This then allows a more specialised sorting of materials found in each respective fraction.
Much progress remains to be made in the sorting process in order to allow higher recycling rates. For example, plastic bottles and their plastic seals can be made into more value added product if recycled separately. Progress in sorting is limited at present by technical difficulties and poor returns on investment.
Subsequent to sorting out the recyclables, non-recyclable solid waste is incinerated or dumped.
Incinerators are a true health and environmental issue. They are getting more sophisticated as there is need to cope with new regulations and large diversity of materials. This opens doors to innovative companies designing sophisticated energy saving techniques and pollution measurements.
3.2. Toxic Waste
Due to increasing and stringent regulatory pressures, more and more wastes are being classified as toxic.
- Medical waste (such as hospital ones), pesticides, heavy metal, pharmaceutical;
- Bio-industries by products (from organic molecules to micro-organisms);
- Chemical wastes;
- Animal waste;
- Metals such as silver, nickel, lithium and cadmium;
- Radioactive isotopes.
At present, no economically integrated treatment exists for radioactive isotopes and the only solution is long term storage. In the case of metals like silver, nickel, lithium or cadmium, recycling is expensive as a result of the high cost of the recycling technologies and there is growing demand for more effective techniques.
For toxic organic components, careful collection and destruction is the usual practice. Nevertheless, more and more recycling techniques are now appearing and constitute an interesting emerging market. The recycling end product can be either raw materials or, in the case of reverse logistic recycling, the original product is reproduced and is at least as good as the original. This is generally where the highest economic value is found.
Reverse logistic systems, can now be commercially developed as a result of recent technological progress. We are at the forefront of the search of companies involved in developing reverse logistics systems.