Hello!
Every year the problem of waste disposal becomes more and more serious.
Landfills cover vast areas.
That is why it is very important to master the technologies through which waste processing
will be carried out.
In our video we will tell you how garbage is recycled in India.
Today, India produces more waste than any country in the world except China.
The government is taking all sorts of measures to reduce waste, including a ban on single-use
plastics.
But most people in the country solve the problem of waste on their own.
From making soot tiles to stuffing teddy bears with old cigarette butts.
This is how India deals with its waste.
For example, these sneakers are also made of garbage.
The company that makes them claims each pair is made from 10 plastic bags and 12 bottles.
Priced at $110 a pair, the company will ship them anywhere in the world.
Thaely receives plastic bags and waste from a garbage company called Triotap Technologies,
which employs junk workers.
The waste is then turned into regular sneakers.
Even if you wanted to, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between regular sneakers
and those made out of trash.
First, the bags are washed in a jacuzzi filled with ordinary water, without the addition
of chemicals, and then hung to dry.
The worker folds the finished packages in 8-10 layers.
Then such a stack is placed under a heat press.
This finished product will cover most of the sneakers.
The manufacturing company calls this material ThaelyTex.
Thus, this material is completely made from plastic bags without the use of any chemicals.
The company packs and ships them to the north of the country, to the Nitush Footwear shoe
factory.
Here shoes will be made from these packages.
First, ThaelyTex sheets are cut using metal molds.
Other patterns are cut from RPET fabric, made from recycled plastic bottles and woven with
a canvas-like appearance.
Workers sew two types of materials together.
The assembled "top" of the shoe is stretched.
The soles of Thaely sneakers are made from industrial rubber crumbs.
The worker needs to sand the sole on this sander so that the adhesive that will be added
in the next step will adhere well.
Workers cover the upper part of the sole with transparent glue.
Special ultraviolet light increases its stickiness.
The shoes then go through a series of heat treatments and special coatings to hold the
sole and upper together.
The last step is embroidery.
Thaely shoe laces are also made from recycled plastic.
India produces 3.5 million tons of plastic waste annually.
The Chuck Company has proposed replacing some of this plastic with biodegradable sugar cane
waste.
India is the second largest sugar producer in the world.
So, in 2020, its production amounted to more than 25 million tons.
And that means mountains - bagasse, the fibrous remnants of sugar cane.
Only one sugar factory "KM" produces more than 3,500 tons of waste during the harvest
season.
It can be difficult to work with, and typically most of this material will be burned to generate
electricity.
Because it is a low pollution alternative to fossil fuels.
But today this waste has other uses.
It turned out that this fiber is very well suited for forming.
For example, Veda Krishna's family has been processing sugarcane waste into paper for
over 40 years in a factory owned by his parents.
But Veda's business ran into financial problems and faulty equipment.
Ved then returned to the drawing board and spent a lot of time experimenting with new
ways to use bagasse.
In the end, he realized that sugarcane fibers could be molded into various products.
They can actually be used as a replacement for expanded polystyrene products.
Since 2017, the company has been producing tableware under the Chuck brand.
Its advantage is that it is disposable.
"Chak" means "taste" in Hindi.
Ved opened a facility close to sugar plantations and factories to reduce production costs and
reduce carbon emissions.
During the peak harvest season, about 100 truckloads of bagasse arrive at Chuck's plant
each day.
Unloading each truck can take two hours.
Time is important here, if the material dries out, the fiber will lose strength, so it has
to be kept in wet bales.
Before washing and pressure cooking, workers remove a layer of tiny fibers.
It's like removing Velcro with an alkaline solution.
The alkaline solution helps to make the cane waste plastic.
The workers then wash the sediment again to remove chemical residue.
Then the mass is poured into machines that give it a shape, while squeezing out all the
water.
Some companies bleach their products, but Chuck's has given up on this.
They believe that in order to remain environmentally sustainable, products should contain as few
chemicals as possible.
The company packs its products in environmentally friendly compostable starch-based packaging
instead of harmful plastic.
Therefore, the main concept of the enterprise is to produce products and make our Earth
cleaner.
And if so, then they have achieved their goal.
Before shipment, the quality of the finished product is carefully checked.
It is counted and packaged.
Today, Chuck's facility can produce up to one million individual items per day.
Waste is increasingly ending up in India's largest rivers, which are considered sacred
by Hindus.
Every day, millions of believers present flowers to their gods.
One of the Indian companies decided to turn these flower waste into incense sticks.
It all starts in bustling wholesale markets like the one in Shivalaya.
Traders collect flowers to be sold outside of Hindu temples.
Since these flowers are used in rituals, they are considered sacred and should not be thrown
in the trash.
More than 1,000 tons of flowers fall into the Ganges every day.
But many of the flowers contain toxic chemicals such as arsenic, lead and cadmium, as well
as pesticides.
Company chief Ankit Agarwal says he has seen people put flowers in water all their lives,
but no one has ever questioned temple waste as a source of pollution before.
Ankit founded Phool, which means flower in Hindi.
Employees of the company take out garbage from temples throughout Kanpur, making about
19 stops a day.
They then transport the flowers to the Phula facility, where they are weighed and stripped
of thread, fabric and plastic.
For the production of incense sticks, workers leave only flower petals, which are sorted
by color.
The buds and stems will be processed into compost, which will be sold as a separate
product.
The workers then lay out the flower petals on a large sheet of tarp to dry.
When the flowers are dry, they are ground into a powder, which is manually mixed with
water and essential oils until it has a clay-like consistency.
The mixture is then rolled out.
Workers dip their fingers into the flower powder and roll it out to a uniform thickness.
The sticks are then allowed to dry before being immersed in the essential oils again.
Next, the sticks are laid out to dry again, and then packed.
Workers at the plant can produce about 400 incense sticks per hour.
The company calls this transformation the flower cycle.
It is believed here that their products are cleaner than others, as incense sticks are
usually made from charcoal.
And burning coal gives off poisonous sulfur dioxide and also releases a lot of xylenes.
And despite the unhealthy air in India, many people continue to smoke regularly.
Entrepreneurs decided to turn these cigarette butts into stuffing for teddy bears.
Every year, people throw away 4.5 trillion cigarette butts.
They often think that filters are just biodegradable cotton and there is nothing wrong with them.
But it's actually just a small piece of plastic soaked in formaldehyde, nicotine, and tons
of other chemicals.
One savvy company has found a way to use cigarette butts, such as filling toys with them.
They are also used to stuff pillows and make mosquito repellants.
Here the question arises, will this solve the problem of disposing of cigarette butts
in order to clear the streets of them and how safe is this?
You can find out how it all works if you visit a city called Noida in the northern part of
India.
At the plant, workers check almost 7 million cigarette butts every month with a metal detector.
This super scanner is used to detect any metal objects in the material, as well as illegal
things that can harm the employees of the enterprise.
A network of hundreds of people collect cigarette butts on the streets of Noida.
Code Effort pays them about 300 rupees or 230 rubles per kilogram of cigarette butts.
Code Effort delivers waste to contractors' homes, where they sort it into filters, paper
and tobacco.
The harvested tobacco is taken to nearby farms for composting.
The paper enters an industrial shredder and is treated with organic binders.
The sheets are dried in the sun, then cut, packaged and sold online or in local shops.
The paper and the remaining nicotine act as a mosquito repellent when burned.
Like mosquito repellants, the campaign is branded NMOSQ, which is an acronym for words
meaning "no mosquitoes".
To use the record, you just need to set it on fire from one end.
Plastic fibers from the filters fall into the same chopper.
They are then soaked in sterilizing chemicals for 24 hours, after which they become like
cotton.
The composition of the chemical mixture is a company secret, but the processes involved
in processing cigarette butts have been independently certified as safe.
At the last stage of the process, the cotton is fluffed and given a set shape.
And this stage is very important in order for the final products, such as soft toys,
pillows and key chains, to be very soft and comfortable.
All these products are sold online on the Internet or through intermediaries.
India has the most unhealthy air in the world.
There are several reasons for this.
The first is that in many homes, food is cooked on firewood and manure.
This results in a large emission of smoke.
The second reason is a lot of car traffic.
Compared to 2003, the number of cars on the roads has more than quadrupled.
Pollution is most felt at the beginning of winter when farmers burn agricultural waste.
In India, diseases caused by air pollution kill more than 1 million people a year.
This is 10-20 times higher than the United States.
The good news is that black carbon is short-lived.
It stays in the air for only a few weeks.
It is not like the invisible carbon dioxide that can warm the atmosphere for centuries.
But the problem is that people in India burn so many things that the air never gets clean.
Architect Tejas Sydnal decided to put black carbon to good use.
He invented carbon tiles.
In 2020, he launched the Carbon Craft Design project to create products for the market
from recycled waste.
Tejas entered into a contract to receive black carbon from a tire recycling company.
The plant simply releases it into the atmosphere, while receiving cheap fuel.
But when this fuel is burned, it will again enter the atmosphere, polluting it even more.
The Carbon Craft Company breaks this cycle by putting poisonous powder in their tiles.
The powder comes in huge bags.
It is dry and completely black as pitch.
The bags are sent to a factory that has been making handmade tiles for 35 years.
Many mass-produced tiles only harden in kilns that fire them at high temperatures.
But carbon tiles made from cement are never fired, so the process doesn't require much
energy.
It is also the way to make tiles with the lowest carbon footprint.
Tejas places a powder order every time it finds a new customer.
Workers enforce a production process that has been around for over 200 years.
Now they are replacing some of the old ingredients with black carbon.
Once the powder has a uniform consistency, workers mix it with water to create a slurry.
The amount of black carbon in the mixture affects the shade of the cement.
It takes some skill to get the right ratio.
If you add too much water, the tiles won't stick together.
And if there is too little water, it can ruin the drawing.
Each design has its own metal stencil.
Workers pour mortar into voids.
One of the most difficult tasks is to get clean lines, so the workers have to do everything
very quickly.
You need to remove the stencil in one motion, otherwise it may distort the drawing.
Then the back layer is added.
It also contains carbon.
The first layer serves more for aesthetics and pattern, while the back layer provides
strength.
The factory's only hydraulic press compresses the tile into shape and helps it harden.
Cured tiles still need to be bonded through a process called water curing.
This means that they are washed with water every day for almost a month.
Fully cured tiles are subject to rough polishing and final rinsing.
After that, they are packaged for sale.
All carbon tiles are made to order.
The company says it can produce up to 200 tiles per day.
These tiles cost less than $2 each.
This is comparable in price to carbon-free cement tiles.
The largest order so far has been about 10 square meters.
Today Carbon Craft is working for the future with many architects and interior designers
who are interested in tackling this big air pollution problem in India.
Manan, a general contractor in Mumbai, installed this carbon tile in his room.
This tile is 8 by 8 in solid gray.
This was the first time she had been laid on the floor in a room.
But installing it is quite difficult.
Cement tiles require a lot of extra polishing, even after they've been installed.
In the process of work, it is polished 3-4 times, which takes
from 15 to 20 days.
Of course, other mass-produced tiles that have been cured at high temperatures do not
undergo this treatment.
But Manan says
the environmental benefits outweigh any downsides.
He is pleased with the results and recommends the tiles to his
clients.
In conclusion, it must be said that perhaps sorting and recycling garbage will not save
the world, but it will definitely make it cleaner.
The ecology of the planet and the conditions in which our children and grandchildren will
live depend on each person.
That's all.
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