Translator: Viviane P. Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Five years ago, I embarked on a mission.
I'd heard a statistic
that the average American generates 4.5 pounds of waste each day,
which meant that I was generating my weight in waste every four weeks.
It was mind-boggling to me that we generate this much waste each day
without even thinking twice about where any of it goes.
Today I'd like to share with you
three short stories about what I've learned
about how waste is perceived from different lenses across the globe,
and finally, I'll tell you a little bit about the solution that we've developed
at our company, PK Clean.
My first story is about one of the most marginalized communities in the world.
Waste pickers represent one percent
of the urban population across the developing world.
These are some waste pickers that I met in India a few months ago.
They told me that they earn less than a dollar per day
and that their incomes have been virtually unchanged over the past decade.
What I learned from them
was that sorting through low-value plastics was not worth their time,
and they also told me that plastic wrappers,
such as the candy wrappers that we send from overseas,
end up becoming an environmental burden on developing countries.
The next story I'd like to share with you
is about how plastic waste is impacting our marine life.
My first exposure to this was during my childhood in Australia,
during beach cleanups.
Apparently, that was only the tip of the iceberg
because an estimated 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic waste
is said to be across the ocean's surfaces globally.
Nothing tells the story more powerfully than these images,
and perhaps even more powerful is the impact that this has on humans,
who eventually end up eating many types of marine life.
My third and final story
is about how waste is perceived by the average American.
This story is about myself.
An honest look at my own waste consumption is, frankly, embarrassing.
This is a picture that I took of my daily consumption of food.
While this may look all very healthy and organic,
unfortunately, I know that none of these plastic items will ever be recycled.
That's because even though I'll put them in my recycling bin,
my recycler won't pull these out, due to their low recycling value.
Either these items are going to be headed to landfill
or perhaps sent to Asia in order to avoid the landfill fee
and to be further picked through by waste pickers,
or even worse,
perhaps they'll fall into the ocean somewhere along the way.
The common thread across all three of these stories
is how challenging plastic waste is.
While metal and paper recycling rates have grown over the decades,
plastic recycling has stayed relatively unchanged, at under 10%.
Plastic is the worst type of waste to bury because it never decomposes.
My biggest question was, "Why is plastic's recycling rate so low?"
It turns out that in order to recycle plastic,
you need to have a pure stream of a specific number -
numbers one through seven,
which you can find under your plastic packaging container.
Once you mix all these different plastic numbers into your recycling bin,
it becomes very difficult to separate them out.
Typically, recyclers pull out PET, such as water bottles and soda bottles,
as well as HDPE, such as milk bottles and detergent bottles,
and much of the rest of the plastic waste
ends up being a residual, mixed waste stream
that looks something like this.
What you're looking at here
is the challenge facing waste pickers, marine life, and domestic recyclers.
It's that certain plastic waste streams
are simply too mixed and too dirty to separate out.
I knew that since plastic came from oil to begin with,
that there had to be a way to recover oil back from plastic.
This is why I started PK Clean.
What we do is we take mixed, dirty, landfill-bound plastic waste,
and we feed it into an oxygen-free reactor
which is heated up,
and the resulting vapors are condensed back into oil.
At a high level, the chemistry is very straightforward.
Plastic is comprised of long carbon chains.
What we do is we cut down these chains into smaller chains between C12 and C20,
which is similar to diesel fuel.
The end product is a fuel that looks like this.
We're able to achieve an energy recovery of roughly 95% overall.
(Applause)
In New York City,
diesel trucks carry garbage over 25 million miles each year
and consume over 11 million gallons of diesel.
New York City sends its plastic waste residual waste streams
to landfills in states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.
If instead we converted these into fuel,
we'd be able to get more than enough
to fuel the diesel trucks in New York City.
So far, we've demonstrated this process in Salt Lake City
at our facility which you can see up here,
and next, we are targeting other large cities.
Beyond this, we see a huge opportunity across the developing world,
and we plan to work directly with waste pickers
in order to give them higher value for their plastics.
And finally, we are working with the Plastic Ocean Project
in order to deploy our technologies across beach and island communities
so that we're able to convert
all the tons of plastic waste which are washed ashore each year
back into fuel.
Global waste is expected to nearly double in the next decade,
from 3.5 million tons to 6 million tons per day.
Innovation is required to slow down this pace of growth,
yet so few young minds consider waste a career path.
Perhaps it's not glamorous enough or that we're not patient enough,
or perhaps we just simply haven't thought of waste beyond a trash can.
Waste is our greatest untapped resource,
and as a society,
we need to change our mindset from seeing waste as waste.
This requires us following the four Rs:
to reduce, reuse, recycle,
and then recover back into energy whatever remains.
But most importantly,
we need to convert a previous generation's challenge
into our generation's greatest opportunity.
So next time you toss something out, remember that there is power in waste,
and it's time we harness it.
(Applause)