The Future of Recycling

In a recent conversation with an entrepreneur friend of mine we got onto the subject of recycling.  We both agreed that recycling has fantastically improved over the last couple of years, but nevertheless it remains awkward, inefficient and unsustainable.  In the future we need to evolve this, but into what?

What needs to happen is recycling and waste disposal need to become like other utility services.  Let’s face it people don’t drive around delivering electricity or gas or water.  Our sewage is not collected by truck.  Ultimately we need to have disposal and recycling in the same manner as other utility services.  So we got to thinking what might this look like?

“Our sewage is not collected by truck. Ultimately we need to have disposal and recycling in the same manner as other utility services. So we got to thinking what might this look like?”

There are a few issues to overcome here, but primarily there are 2 real issues: -

1. How do we remove the recycling and waste to an appropriate facility
2. How do we sort and hence enable processing of the waste

The only logical conclusion for the first of these is that we need to pipe the rubbish from the house, to the processing centres.  We need to eliminate trucks and collections, and stockpiling rubbish at home.  It should be an “open pipe” that we can effectively hurl our rubbish into, and it is “whisked” away for processing.  This is likely to mean some sort of industrial grinding system to turn the waste into a liquid.  Sink grinders used to be popular and what we need is an industrial scale version of this.

As far as pipes go, do we want to lay new piping?  Well, ultimately we may have to, but short-term we want to be able to exploit the existing sewage systems wherever possible.

The second issue is sorting and separating.  You cannot do this with maximum efficiency by relying on people to chuck things down the right shute or pipe.  It is just flawed.  People get it wrong, are lazy or incapable.  So if you have to cope with some people getting it wrong, you might just as well go the whole hog and allow everyone to get it wrong, in other words, one bin/shute/pipe/grinder or whatever it is, and everything goes into that.

The smart work would need to be done at the other end, extracting from the solutions the various components of what is compostable, degradable, metal, glass or plastic recyclable.  All of the technology needed to do this does exist.  We just need the vision, drive and a level of evolution to get us there.

To my mind, this would be ultimate recycling.  Convenient, efficient, foolproof, and effective.

Now which bright sparks are going to look at how we implement this?

I would also welcome alternate views on what the future of recycling might look like. This is just my thoughts but perhaps you have better ideas?

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