Recycling Benefits

Recycling

After waste prevention, recycling has been shown to result in the highest climate benefit compared to other waste management approaches. According to Martchek, “recycling has become increasingly important to society and industry to meet the goals of cost reduction, efficient management of limited resources, and reduced landfill utilization.” In general, the energy consumed in transporting recyclables to reprocessing factories is small in comparison to the energy requirements for the excavation, production and transport of virgin material (Couth & Trois, 2011).

Recycling has many direct benefits (e.g., resource conservation); however, the indirect benefits of recycling, while often overlooked, are also significant. Indirect benefits

Recycling of scrap metals is, in comparison, a lot less energy demanding as, for example, the recycling of aluminium only uses 5% of the energy used for virgin aluminium (Damgaard, Larsen, & Christensen, 2009). Another reason for recycling metals is that metals are limited resources and mineral ore is getting scarcer and more expensive to exploit. Metals from industry and construction have traditionally been recycled as they were available in large quantities (mainly iron and steel), whereas the recycling of metals in municipal solid waste (MSW) has mainly increased over the last decade. Recycling of metals from MSW may occur as source-separated fractions, from co-mingled waste that afterwards has been sorted mechanically, from waste-to-energy facilities where metals are removed from the bottom ash and from mechanical–biological treatment (MBT) plants if they include a metal sorting unit. Recycling of metals requires that foreign elements are removed, and that the metals are sorted into their respective metal

For some products, in addition to this obvious economic dimension, growing environmental concerns and heightened social responsibility, over the last de¬cade in particular, have served to boost recycling activity, in order to conserve resources and to avoid littering. The aluminium economy is a circular econ¬omy. Indeed, for most aluminium products, alumin¬ium is not actually consumed during a lifetime, but simply used. Therefore, the life cycle of an alumini¬um product is not the traditional “cradle-to-grave” sequence, but rather a renewable “cradle-to-cradle”. If scrap is pre-treated and/or sorted appropriately, the recycled aluminium can be utilised for almost all aluminium applications, thereby preserving raw materials and making considerable energy savings.

In 1990 total aluminium production was around 28 million tonnes (with over 8 million tonnes recycled from scrap) and today the total is close to 56 mil¬lion tonnes (with close to 18 million tonnes recycled from scrap). By 2020 metal demand is projected to have increased to around 97 million tonnes (with around 31 million tonnes recycled from scrap). To¬day, around 50% of the scrap is old scrap (i.e. scrap from end-of-life products) (International Aluminium Institute, 2009)

At present, the aluminium industry itself is respon¬sible for around 1% of the man-made greenhouse