I'm a garbage man and you might find it
interesting that I became a garbage man
because I absolutely hate waste
I hope within the next 10 minutes to
change the way you think about a lot of
the stuff in your life and I'd like to
start at the very beginning think back
when you were just a kid how did you
look at the stuff in your life perhaps
it was like these toddler rules it's my
stuff
if I saw it first the entire pile is my
stuff if I'm building something the more
stuff that's mine the better and of
course it's your stuff if it's broken
well after spending about 20 years in
the recycling industry it's become
pretty clear to me that we don't
necessarily leave these toddler rules
behind as we develop into adults and let
me tell you why I have that perspective
because each and every day that our
recycling plants around the world we
handle about 1 million pounds of
people's discarded stuff now a million
pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff
but it's a tiny drop of the durable
goods that are disposed each and every
year around the world well less than 1%
in fact the United Nations estimates
that there's about 85 billion pounds a
year of electronics waste that gets
discarded around the world each and
every year and that's one of the most
rapidly growing parts of our waste
stream and if you throw in other durable
goods like automobiles and so forth that
number well more than doubles and of
course the more developed the country
it's a bigger these mountains now when
you see these mountains most people
think of garbage we see above-ground
mines and the reason we see mines is
because there's a lot of valuable raw
materials that went into making all this
stuff in the first place and it's
becoming increasingly important that we
figure out how to extract these raw
materials from these extremely
complicated waste streams because as
we've heard all week at Ted the world's
getting to be a smaller place with more
people in it who want more and more
stuff and of course they want the toys
and the tools that many of us take for
granted and what goes into making those
toys and tools that we use every single
day it's mostly many types of plastics
and many types of metals and the metals
we typically get from or that we mine in
ever-widening mines and ever deep mines
around the world and the plastics we get
from oil which we go to more remote
locations and drill ever deeper wells to
extract and these practices have
significant economic and environmental
implications that we're already starting
to see today the good news is we are
starting to recover materials from our
end-of-life stuff and starting to
recycle our end-of-life stuff
particularly in regions of the world
like here it in Europe that have
recycling policies in place that require
that this stuff be recycled in a
responsible manner most of what's
extracted from our end-of-life stuff if
it makes it to a recycler are the metals
to put that in perspective and I'm using
steel as a proxy here for metals because
it's the most common metal if your stuff
makes it to a recycler probably over 90
percent of the metals are going to be
recovered and reused for another purpose
the plastics are a whole nother story
well less than ten percenter are
recovered in fact it's more like five
percent most of its incinerated or
landfill
now most people think that's because
plastics are a throwaway material have
very little value but actually plastics
are several times more valuable than
steel and there's more plastics produced
and consumed around the world on a
volume basis every year than steel so
why is such a plentiful and valuable
material not recovered it anywhere near
the rate of a less valuable material
well it's predominantly because metals
are very easy to recycle from other
materials and from one another they have
very different densities they have
different electrical and magnetic
properties and they even have different
colours so it's very easy for either
humans or machines to separate these
metals from one another and from other
materials plastics have overlapping
densities over a very narrow range they
have either identical or very similar
electrical and magnetic properties and
any plastic can be any colors you
probably well known so the traditional
ways of separating materials just simply
don't work for plastics another
consequence of metals being so easy to
recycle by humans is that a lot of our
stuff from the developed world and sadly
to say particularly from the United
States where we don't have any recycling
policies in place like your in your
finds its way to developing countries
for low-cost recycling people for as
little as a dollar a day pick through
our stuff they extract what they can
which is mostly the metals circuit
boards and so forth and they leave
behind mostly what they can't recover
which is again mostly the plastics or
they burn the plastics to get to the
metals in burn houses like you see here
and they extract the metals by hand now
why this might be the low economic cost
solution this is certainly not the low
environmental or human health and safety
solution I call this environmental
arbitrage and it's not fair it's not
safe and it's not sustainable now
because the plastics are so plentiful
and by the way those other methods don't
lead to the recovery of plastics
obviously but people do try to recover
the plastics this is just one example
this is a photo I took standing on the
rooftops of one of the largest slums in
the world in Mumbai India they store
their plastics on the roofs they bring
them below those roofs into small
workshops like these and people tried
very hard to separate the plastics by
color by shape by feel by any technique
they can and sometimes they'll resort to
what's known as the burn and sniff
technique where they'll burn the plastic
and smell the fumes to try to determine
the type of plastic none of these
techniques result in any amount of
recycling in any significant way and by
the way please don't try this technique
at home so what are we to do about this
space-age material at least what we used
to call a space-age material is plastics
well I certainly believe that it's far
too valuable
and far too abundant to keep putting
back in the ground or certainly stand up
in smoke so about 20 years ago I
literally started in my garage tinkering
around trying to figure out how to
separate these very similar materials
from each other and eventually enlisted
a lot of my friends in the mining world
actually in the in the plastics world
and we started going around to mining
laboratories around the world because
after all we're doing above-ground
mining and we eventually broke the code
this is the last frontier of recycling
it's the last major material to be
recovered at any significant amount on
the earth and we finally figured out how
to do it and in the process we started
recreating how the plastics industry
makes plastics
the traditional way to make plastics is
with oil or petrochemicals you break
down the molecules you recombine them in
very specific ways to make all the
wonderful plastics that we enjoy each
and every day we said there's got to be
a more sustainable way to make plastics
and not just sustainable from an
environmental standpoint sustainable
from an economic standpoint as well well
a good place to start is with waste it
certainly doesn't cost as much as oil
and it's plentiful as I hope that you've
been able to see from the photographs
and because we're not breaking down the
plastic into molecules and recombining
them we're using a mining approach to
extract the materials we have
significantly lower capital costs in our
plant equipment we have enormous energy
savings I don't know how many other
projects on the planet right now can
save 80 to 90 percent of the energy
compared to making something the
traditional way and instead of plopping
down several hundred million dollars to
build a chemical plant that will only
make one type of plastic for its entire
life our plants can make any type of
plastic we feed them and we make a
drop-in replacement for that plastic
that's made from petrochemicals our
customers get to enjoy huge co2 savings
they get to close the loop with their
products and they get to make more
sustainable products in the short time
period I have I want to show you a
little bit of a sense about how we do
this
it starts with metal recyclers who shred
our stuff into very small bits they
recover the metals and leave behind
what's called shredder residue it's
their waste very complex mixture of
materials but predominantly plastics we
take out the things that aren't plastics
such as the metals they miss carpeting
foam rubber wood glass paper you name it
even an occasional dead animal
unfortunately and it goes in the first
part of our process here which is more
like traditional recycling we're saving
the material we're using magnets we're
using air classification it looks like a
willy wonka factory at this point at the
end of this process we have a mixed
plastic composite many different types
of plastics and many different grades of
plastics this goes into the more
sophisticated part of our process and
the really hard work multi-step
separation process begins we grind the
plastic down to about the size of your
small fingernail we use a very highly
automated process to sort those plastics
not only by type but by grade and at the
end of that part of the process come
little flakes of plastic one type one
grade we then use optical sorting to
color sort this
we blended in 50,000 pound blending
silos we push that material to extruders
where we melt it push it through small
dye holes make spaghetti like plastic
strands and we chop those strands into
what are called pellets and this becomes
the currency of the plastics industry
this is the same material that you would
get from oil and today we're producing
it from your old stuff and it's going
right back in to your new stuff
so now instead of your stuff ending up
on a hillside in a developing country or
literally going up in smoke you can find
your old stuff back on top of your desk
in new products in your office or back
at work in your home and these are just
a few examples of companies that are
buying our plastic replacing virgin
plastic to make their new products so I
hope I've changed the way you look at
least some of the stuff in your life we
took our clues from other nature mother
nature wastes very little reuses
practically everything and I hope that
you stop looking at yourself as a
consumer that's a label I've always
hated my entire life and think of
yourself as just using resources in one
form until they can be transformed to
another form for another use later in
time and finally I hope you agree with
me to change that last toddler rule just
a little bit to if it's broken it's my
stuff thank you for your time
you