How a Single-Stream Recycling Plant can save the World?

What’s Inside a Single Stream Recycling plant?

The machine that separates your recyclables so you don’t have to

1 Tipping floor

A steady stream of recycling collection vehicles arrives at the facility, dumping their cargo of various recyclables out onto the tipping floor. Drivers look out for any oversized things like car engines that would cause destruction to the plant machines.

2 Loading

Powerful loaders shunt heaps of mixed recyclables into a large hopper, where they are tumbled over a rotating drum to loosen compacted materials. They then flow onto a giant conveyer belt, which speeds the jumble into the main facility.

3 Manual pre-sort

Teams of human sorters pick out non-recyclable items from the fast-moving stream, including crisp packets, plastic bags, shoes, and nappies, as well as big items like scrap metal that might block the machines.

4 Star screen sorting

A series of vibrating, rotating shafts, fitted with offset star-shaped discs, elevate large and light materials like cardboard upwards; smaller items like paper, bottles, and can fall into and remain on the conveyer belt.

5 Medicinal wonder

For a second time, teams of human sorters stand at intervals along the conveyer belt and look out for any smaller contaminants that might have snuck into the mix, such as personal electronics, trinkets, wallets, and pieces of food.

6 Star screens round two

A trio of finer-grained star screens sorts out different grades of paper, which are directed towards dedicated storage units. Glass, metals, and plastics fall through the screens again and remain on the conveyer belt.

7 Glass sorter

As they fall through the star screens, glass containers get crumpled by the rotating stars. The fragments fall into boxes below the screens and are transported offsite to be sorted by color and ground into coarse sand

8 Steel magnet

The remaining materials pass under a powerful rotating belt magnet, which lifts out tin and steel cans and drops them into a storage bunker. This usually only removes around four percent of the recyclables moving through the plant.

9 Eddy current separator

Since aluminum isn’t magnetic, it is picked out using a strong reverse magnet called an eddy current separator. This uses spinning magnets to produce a current in the cans, which makes them fly off the belt and into a bunker.

10 Optical sorting with IR lasers

A series of vibrating, rotating shafts, fitted with offset star-shaped discs, elevate large and light materials like cardboard upwards; smaller items like paper, bottles, and can fall through and continue on the conveyer belt.

11 Manual sorting

The remaining plastics are carefully sorted by teams of workers. They also conduct a last check, picking out and redirecting any recyclable items that have been missed by the mechanical processes and remain on the line.

12      Baler

One at a time, the bunkers are opened, pouring out plastic, cans, metals or paper. Baling machines squeeze these into cubic bales ready to be taken to reprocessing plants for recycling. Any leftover materials at this point go to a landfill site.

Ground pollution

The toxic chemicals lurking beneath the surface of our poisoned planet

Land pollution isn’t just about the space that is taken up by landfill. A city the size of New York could fit all of its rubbish for the next thousand years in a landfill 56 kilometers long by 56 kilometers wide. That sounds like a lot, but that’s the waste of just 2.5 percent of Americans buried in just 0.03 percent of the country’s land area. And that land isn’t gone forever – eventually, a landfill site will just become a grassy hill.

The real source of land pollution is all of the other things that don’t end up in the landfill. Copper and aluminum mining generate huge piles of powdered rock, called ‘tailings’, left behind after the metal has been extracted. These tailings are high in toxic heavy metals, such as mercury and cadmium, and aluminum mining alone generates more than 77 million tons of tailings worldwide every single year.

Modern farming also requires more than just sunshine and rain. In the UK, farmers add an average of 100 kilograms of nitrogen fertilizer to every hectare of arable land and grassland each year. Whatever the crops don’t absorb gets washed into the groundwater and ends up in our rivers, going from land to water pollution.

The low-tech solutions to land pollution are the three Rs: reduce, reuse, recycle, and these are in decreasing order of effectiveness. Reducing the amount of cardboard or cabbage you need to buy in the first place has a much bigger impact than simply recycling all the leftovers, because it also saves the energy that would have been required to process and transport them to you, and then collect and recycle them again afterward. But there are high-tech pollution solutions as well. Bioremediation uses selected strains of naturally occurring organisms to break down contaminants in the soil. Wood fungi, for example, have been shown to be able to break down the toxins in oil spills and also certain chlorine pesticides. Heavy metals like cadmium and lead can’t be broken down, but certain plants will take them up through their roots and store them in their leaves or stems. This technique, which is known as phytoremediation, uses plants to soak pollutants from the ground so that they can be removed more easily. Chinese brake fern can even filter out arsenic in this way.

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