From Recycling To Upcycling 2017 Sustainability Research Report by Cerra Teng
GLOBAL WARMING Over the past 50 years, the average global temperature has increased at the fastest rate in recorded history. And experts see the trend is accelerating: All but one of the 16 hottest years in NASA’s 134-year record have occurred since 2000. Global warming occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) and other air pollutants and greenhouse gases collect in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar radiation that have bounced off the earth’s surface. Normally, this radiation would escape into space—but these pollutants, which can last for years to centuries in the atmosphere, trap the heat and cause the planet to get hotter. That’s what’s known as the greenhouse effect.
In recent years, China has taken the lead in global-warming pollution, producing about 28 percent of all CO2 emissions. The United States comes in second. Despite making up just 4 percent of the world’s population, we produce a whopping 16 percent of all global CO2 emissions—as much as the European Union and India (third and fourth place) combined. And America is still number one, by far, in cumulative emissions over the past 150 years.
Source: https://www.nrdc.org/stories/global-warming-101 https://climate.nasa.gov/
CO2 Emission China - 28%
USA - 16%
EU + India - 16%
Each year, scientists learn more about the consequences of global warming, and many agree that environmental, economic, and health consequences are likely to occur if current trends continue. The impacts of global warming are being felt across the globe. Extreme heat waves have caused tens of thousands of deaths around the world in recent years. And in an alarming sign of events to come, Antarctica has been losing about 134 billion metric tons of ice per year since 2002. This rate could speed up if we keep burning fossil fuels at our current pace, some experts say, causing sea levels to rise several meters over the next 50 to 150 years. The diagram at the right shows the examples of climate anomalies and events.
How to stop global warming? Reducing emissions of and stabilizing the levels of heattrapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Either by reducing sources of these gases (for example, the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat or transport) or enhancing the “sinks” that accumulate and store these gases (such as the oceans, forests and soil). The goal of mitigation is to avoid significant human interference with the climate system, and “stabilize greenhouse gas levels in a timeframe sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner”. As one American scientist recently put it: “Reducing global emissions is as simple as putting recyclables on the curb.” Why is recycling such a key weapon? According to many studies, such as the Stern report released last year by the British Government, deforestation and landfill account for about 25 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions every year. Source: http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/how-recycling-can-be-a-weapon-against-global-warming/2007/10/04/1191091278424.html
Taiwan, where I was born and growing up, was once known as Garbage Island. Now, it has an impressive recycling rate of 55%.
RECYCLING IN THE USA
National average recycling rate is 34.5% in 2013. Since there is no national law that mandates recycling, state and local governments often introduce recycling requirements. A number of U.S. states, including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii,
Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont have passed laws that establish deposits or refund values on beverage containers while other jurisdictions rely on recycling goals or landfill bans of recyclable materials.
Denver - 12% Portland - 70%
San Francisco - 80%
New York - 22%
Los Angeles- 76.4% San Diego- 68%
Jacksonville, Florida - 47%
Dallas - 44.6% Austin - 28.8%
SINGLE-STREAM RECYCLING Single-stream recycling refers to a system in which all paper fibers, plastics, metals, and other containers are mixed in a collection truck, instead of being sorted by the depositor into separate commodities and handled separately throughout the collection process. Single-stream recycling programs were first developed in several California communities in the 1990s. Subsequently, many large and small municipalities across the United States began singlestream programs. As of 2012, there are 248 MRFs (materials recovery facility) operating in the U.S. As of 2013, 100 million Americans were served by singlestream programs.
Recyclables are disposed and collected at the same bin. This picture was taken at the household in Niwot, Colorado.
Advantages
Disadvantages
Single-stream recycling makes it almost as easy to use the recycling bin as it is to use the trash can, so for the previously unconverted, there’s no excuse for not recycling.” And indeed, convenience is the greatest advantage of single-stream recycling -- convenience that can significantly increase the amount of refuse put in recycling bins.
In single-stream programs, it is virtually impossible to prevent glass from breaking as it goes to the curb, is dumped in the truck, gets compacted, gets dumped on the tipping floor of the MRF, is repeatedly driven over by forklifts, and is dumped on conveyor belts to be processed by the MRF.
Single-stream recycling provides the convenience in the region where the civic virtue of recycling is not as highly developed.
Glass easily breaks while being collected and sorted. As much as 40% in the case of glass ends up going to the dump.
Paper usually gets wet and torn into little pieces that can’t be recycled.
At Ann Arbor, the end product contamination was up to 15%, while with dual stream the end product contamination was only 2%.
Interview with the expert!
Where do recyclables go after sorting? Most of them are sent to the local recycling facilities. Damaged glass is recycled for landfill in Denver; scrape metal such as aluminum is recycled at Coors facility at Golden. Momentum Glass at Louisville recycles glasses for house insulation. What are the main challenges that Boulder faces now?
Zero Waste Sustainability Specialist at Boulder County, Leigh Ratterman
Why the recycling rate is Colorado is relatively low? Colorado recycling rate is about 12% while the average of nationwide is 34.5%. Boulder county does a better job - 39%. There’s not much incentive in Colorado since the landfill fee is relatively low - $17/ton while the average of nation is $200/ton. The politics also plays the important role in it. Recycling materials sorting facility in Boulder, Colorado
The concrete composes 40% of the waste in weight. While there is a recycling facility, Oxford Recycling in Denver, the expense of transportation is often too high to make it work. The food compost is another issue. Farmers would rather buy chemical fertilizer than compost since it’s more expensive. The compost sometimes has unexpected contains which farmers don’t like. What is the next goal that Boulder County aims at? In long term, we hope zero waste in 2025. The plan is still pretty vague. Currently we are planning to upgrade the recycling machine this year and keep pushing the education. We also try to push the policy through.
HERE TODAY, WHERE TOMORROW?
THE UPCYCLE Rethink about how we use the materials - redesign it for five planets.
Less bad is no good.
It’s not waste; it’s a nutrient.
Forest is capital, not just currency.
Closing the loops.
The current problem is that people rely only on eco-efficiency to minimize their negative impact. Basically making a suboptimal system more efficient by curtailing how much “bad” it produces: not doing the right things, but doing the wrong things better. It is insufficient as a strategy because it encourages us to stick with what is poorly designed - just to try to do less of it.
The materials can be designed to differentiate between the biosphere and technosphere and become nutrients forever. Think of juice box, an amalgam of aluminum, plastic and raw paper that cannot easily be recycled. We weaken the technical-nutrient quality of aluminum. It ends up mountains of suboptimal packaging in the dump or the incinerator. The soil and air and water are contaminated. This conventional design is “cradle to grave.”
The rainforest often represents the epitome of untouched nature, a fragile prey of human avarice. The Amazon tribes would often select little saplings in their journeys and hunting forays that they wished to promote and nip surrounding seedlings in the bud. These people engaged in tiny acts with consequences after millenia. They recognized that the forest was capital, not just currency. The rainforest is a garden. Humans used intention to tend it.
Cradle to Cradle is a richly informed engagement with the biosphere and technosphere with continuous use periods over time. Most materials are not recycled but downcycled - degraded in quality through the “recycling” process. A closed loop is not a positive event if the material being reprocessed is toxic.
People have taken crucial, valuable terrestrial carbon and put it where they can’t reach it. Of all the things humans might do with carbon, just about the worst is burning it. Environmentalists, government leaders, and even industrialists have talked about the benefits of “trading” carbon. But carbon’s real value is not in trade but in capture. The optimization of carbon is in soil, or in your children, or in your tomato. It’s not “waste” to be minimized, and it certainly is too valuable to be dispersed the way it is now.
People need to realize they can have - and historically have had - a more symbiotic relationship.
People need to think of where they might devise moments of optimization. What might the positive metrics look like? How about more solar energy produced per hour? More water purified during a manufacturing process? If human being upcycle, they can all live productively on one planet. People don’t need to have less of a negative environmental footprint: They can have a positive footprint.
We could put forth a design model based on thriving people sharing the present with the future instead of running out of everything while toxifying the rest.
Making a plastic bottle into a fleece garment is not upcycle. From the materials perspective, a plastic that was food grade is no longer food grade. A plastic that may contain antimony has now been added to it. The material itself has lost the capacity for recycling because it’s mixed with these other things. How could bottle-to-fleece process be upcycled? Instead of adding undefined colorants and rinses and fixatives in factories far away that not have coherent protocols in place, this fleece, with clean chemistry, might have polyester buttons and threads added, which would make it very simple recycle.
Traditional cost-down strategy
Value-first redesign plan
Metrics
House the most people at the lowest cost.
Human values
Establish the value or values for your company’s engagement with the world.
Tactics
Reduce the amount and cost of material needed for construction.
Strategies
Compress dimensions to save square inches and feet of materials.
Principles
Then work with teams to establish your principles.
Goals
Create the smallest habitable structure for a human being.
Goals
Then develop goals to realize those values.
Principles
N/A - it’s too late to be talking about principles when you have already developed your metrics and your tactics and your goals.
Strategies
Then develop strategies to meet those goals.
Human values
Unexpressed.
Tactics
Then develop strategies to meet those goals.
Metrics
Develop metrics to measure the effectiveness of those tactics.
Upcycle solution
How “good” are you as a designer if the object you design causes harm, destroys the environment, or endangers children’s health? - Michael Bralingart, the author of The Upcycle
What had been done? Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
“How can I make something that is as much fun to reuse - to send into the next cycle as it is to use?�
Redesign, Renew, Regenerate
What could be?
Green Guru at Boulder, CO recycled bike tubes, wetsuit, climbing ropes, tents, banners and factory nylon scraps to make biking gears and accessories.
Optimize materials or ingredients
Upcycling products of service
Intelligent materials pooling
Sorting technical ingredients
Society has the capability of being more careful with its raw materials. For example, no one would dump gold away. But some rare-earth and heavy metals such as cobalt, Indium, Lithium used in many electronic products, are thrown away with the products.
It can be as basic as reclaiming whole products or as advanced as identifying and reusing particular chemicals. If products are designed to be easily disassembled and with parts that have a specified reusable content, shipping products between countries will be easier. For example, in Poland, ownership is almost a religion, so the “product of service” is purchased outright, along with a deposit that is refundable when the product is returned “unharmed” to the manufacturer at the end of the use period.
The principle behind the Intelligent Materials Pooling (IMP) is that technical materials - what we call technical nutrition - can be endlessly reused. If businesses collaborated to reclaim the high-quality raw technical nutrients from each other, they would be incentivized to use the highest quality substances, since they would know they would be getting the pure raw materials back again.
Valuable technical materials can easily be encoded with information, “materials passports”, detailing all of a product’s ingredients and properties, so that when the product moves from one process or industry - and one country - to another, its makeup and technical nutrition is known and communicated.
Start with good intentions right from the beginning of the design process. Optimizing materials means choosing the fabrics or metals or polymers that begin with goodness in mind. Sometimes, when a technical nutrient known to be a toxin or endocrine disrupter exists in a product meant to be used in biological systems it is replaced. But the substitute ingredients seems less bad because people don’t know enough about how the chemical interacts in biological systems. This blind use it not a solution. Good design, with intention, with the goal of upcycling in mind, makes things better over time: fair, healthy, safe, quality for all - at all economic levels, in even distant places.
When preexisting systems and local needs are taken into account and sensitively interpreted, the product of service model becomes optimized. The concept “contingent assets” is the production of liability converts to the production of assets. Assets treated as currency - here today, gone tomorrow become resources. Upcycling products of service can apply to a range of goods that use technical materials. We can now design computers and television sets in which all the parts are defined plastics and metals, glued together with a new reversible glue, so that when the product is heated in a disassembly procedure, the glue shrinks and the parts fall apart, greatly simplifying recovery of all the elements.
The benefit would be more than just environmental. It would be economic. Valuable materials such as alloys, stabilizers and polymers were designed for reuse. If all products were encoded, the nutrient management companies of the IMP might ask retailers to please tell their suppliers to design packaging so that nutrient management could optimize value at the back end, sending that material on to a different manufacturer. Value could be monetized and exchanged. Designers would know the parameters of the packaging they were creating.
Techniques exist right now to enable marking of a chemical so you can find it later. There is a place for middle management in the handling of these technical species. A potentially huge part of our future economy is just now coming into existence. The two steps - aggregate and return - are beginning to be monetized in our massproduction society. “Waste handler” are becoming “nutrient managers.” The nutrient management can be big business. The Van Gansenwinkel Groep has gone from being a waste management company to a nutrient management company. It employees nearly 7,500 people and has annual turnover of €1.2 billion.
FROM BOTTLES TO FIBER
YARN
PELLET
SCRAPE
Plastic bottles labeled with the #1 on the bottom are the same chemistry make-up as polyester, which is called PET, or technically known as polyethylene terephthalate. After years of development, REPREVE finetuned a proprietary process that allows us to transform PET bottle flakes into fiber, which is then used in thousands of different fabrics and products available globally.
Every bottle that gets turned into REPREVE and made into a fleece jacket or a pair of khakis means a little less petroleum wasted. And a little less pollution. Today, In the U.S., nearly 70% of our plastic bottles end up in landfills. Saving the environment starts from recycling.
630 MILLION Bottle caps are collected and sold to furniture companies
Bottle are recycled and made into fabric which is used by leading brands in outdoor industry.
About REPREVE REPREVE is a brand of recycled fiber that is made from recycled materials, including used plastic bottles. It offsets the need to use new resources, such as petroleum, and emits fewer greenhouse gases. Energy, water and greenhouse gas savings were determined by an independent firm using life cycle inventory (LCA) of the full
manufacturing process compared to the same process for virgin fiber. Our approach is described as cradle-to-factory gate, which begins with an oil well for virgin or waste collection point for recycle and ending with chip, staple or yarn. Gas, water per person and pine forest numbers are based on equivalency information sourced primarily from the EPA.
SUSTAINABLE HOUSE Designed to be “off-the-gridready� homes, Earthship is a solar house with minimal reliance on public utilities and fossil fuels. The house is made of both natural and upcycled materials such as earthpacked tires and glass bottles. The concept began to take shape in the 1970s. The architect Michael Reynolds developed U-shaped earth-filled tire homes which have become common today. An Earthship addresses 5 principles or human needs. 1. Food Production No matter what climate it is, Earthships can grow their own food and crops year-round, thanks to the 2 greenhouses that each house is outfitted with. 2. Water Recycling Water used in an Earthship is harvested from rain, snow, and condensation. As water collects on the roof, it is channeled through a silt-catching device and into a cistern. The cisterns are positioned to gravity-feed a water organization module that filters out bacteria and contaminants, making it suitable for drinking. The paradigm of 100% sustainable home - Earthship
3. Electricity The majority of electrical energy
is harvested from the sun and wind. Photovoltaic panels and windturbines on or near the Earthship generate DC electricity that is stored in deep-cycle batteries. The batteries are housed in a purpose-built room on the roof. Additional energy can be obtained from gasolinepowered generators or by integrating with the city grid. 4.Sewage Treatment Earthships contain, use and reuse all household sewage in indoor and outdoor treatment cells. This results in food production and landscaping with no pollution of aquifers. Toilets flush with treated gray water that does not smell. 5. Thermal Performance Earthships rely on a balance between the solar heat gain and the ability of the tire walls and subsoil to transport and store heat. They will soak up heat during the day and radiate heat during the night, keeping the interior climate relatively comfortable all day. Some Earthships are sunk into the earth to take advantage of earthsheltering to reduce temperature fluctuations.
Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, Think. - Hildgard of Bingen