Waste offers a wealth of opportunities

9 March 2018 | Category: Geen categorie

Do you have any idea how much value your waste still contains, including your residual waste and sewage? There’s more in it than you might think. Hamburger boxes for example, contain interesting fibres for new products. Foil can be made less permeable to oxygen using starch from potato peel. Biodegradable plastic can be made from sewage.

‘Raw materials are still hidden in a lot of waste,’ says Christiaan Bolck, programme leader at Wageningen Food & Biobased Research. ‘We can often use these for new products. It’s always possible to still burn them.’

“Our waste still has considerable value from which new materials can be made. ”
Christiaan Bolck, Wageningen Food & Biobased Research
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It may not sound sexy to research new materials made from waste. And yes, wheelie bins really are turned upside down and explored for research. But reuse is really important: raw materials are becoming scarcer while the world population grows and with it, demand. Fossil fuels in particular contribute to the climate problem. Reducing waste will yield environmental benefits.

Second life

Reuse is itself an ancient practice. Old iron has been melted down for centuries to make something new, and for a long time old clothing was used in the paper industry. With the growth of the waste mountain, reuse has received more attention over the last 50 years. In the Netherlands, the first glass recycling bins for the collection of glass bottles and pots appeared in the 1970s. Shortly afterwards, more and more associations, church organisations and schools collected old paper, because selling it brought in money. In 1992, the collection of vegetable, fruit and garden waste (GFT) by municipalities started, and ten years ago marked the start of the collection of plastic or, more accurately, of plastic packaging.

Despite developments in the field of recycling, not nearly all consumer waste (plastic packaging, drinks cartons, glass, metal, etc.) is now being recycled. For plastic packaging, about 20-30 per cent is now recycled. That is the net recycling yield, i.e. without moisture, dirt, other materials and processing losses: gross, 40-50 per cent of the plastic packaging is recycled.

Suitable for recycling

Only about 60 per cent of plastic packaging is currently suitable for reuse. Also, considering the amount of consumer waste, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Furthermore, the Dutch government also wants there to be no more waste, as we know it today, by 2050; the Netherlands must become waste-free.

Opportunities for reuse of waste

Researchers at Wageningen Food & Biobased Research still see many opportunities for high-quality reuse of consumer waste. Four points are important for this:

Design products and materials so that they can be recycled with the available collection and processing processes.

Collect separately as much as possible (separation at source), because that provides the best quality for reuse.

Keep the recyclable materials as clean as possible by separating disruptive substances (such as ink and dirt) from the main product as thoroughly as possible, because this improves the quality of the new material.

Maintain the unique functionality of every waste stream, as well as possible.

Strength, toughness, odour and colour

Wageningen University & Research (WUR) has expertise in the properties of recycled materials, separation processes and the circularity that is required. What about the strength, toughness, odour and colour of the recyclable material, how can you process it and what criteria must it meet to make a new product? Can you mechanically or chemically recycle the material, leaving the building blocks for new materials that you can use again? And what does recycling mean in terms of organisation, economics and the environment? For example, this spring, WUR’s research into the recycling of paper coffee cups revealed that recycling has fewer environmental costs than fermentation and composting of the cups.

Do you have any questions or comments? Go into conversation below.

Christiaan Bolck

Christiaan has been working on product and market development of renewable materials, such as plastics, paper, pulp and building materials, for twenty years. He was involved in the development of packaging for tomatoes made from the stalks of the same tomatoes and the drawing up of a master plan calling for large scale recycling, in order to achieve a circular economy for plastics (Masterplan Kunstof Kringloop).

More about Christiaan Bolck

There are 3 comments.

By: Vinod R Dahake · 10-03-2018 at 13:48

Very comprehensive article . I wish we could do more on these lines. another issue is e Waste. This has lot of value and secondly we need to recycle useful material
Thanks

By: Alie van de Ridder · 12-03-2018 at 09:28

Good to read you are working on this current problem of the remnant of waste materials in finding out different ways of recycling materials to achieve a circular economy for plastics.
In my opinion its worth finding out as many packing materials that are biodegradable and working on a policy for replacing the old materials. Because disciplining people to separate waste materials will always succeed to a certain degree, which may not be enough for solving the problem of pollution by packing materials completely.

By: Evelius Rwebangira Vedasto · 13-03-2018 at 14:36

Good idea. I think is the valid idea of recycling or re-using packaging materials, the problem of most of the our companies in my country are not investing in recycling packaging materials except plastic material. In addition, you could think of capacity building among the consumers on utilizing bins allocated around the streets,also developing policy for forcing manufacturers or food processors to use recyclable or reusable packaging materials.

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