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You mentioned Shanghai and Beijing, but note that sorting waste isn't new to the country. I was part of a team that installed a single-stream waste sorting sys
by foofoo55 6y ago
You mentioned Shanghai and Beijing, but note that sorting waste isn't new to the country. I was part of a team that installed a single-stream waste sorting system in China in 2007, prior to the Olympics. It was a very impressive system where all garbage would enter at one end and a large array of machines and people would sort the garbage into recyclables, compost, and the rest for an incinerator. It used all the latest tech, mainly from North America.
- dv_dt 6y agoDo you have any good links to the machinery / tech that does that kind of sorting? I've search for it in the past and it seems like I was mostly getting hits on European manufacturers.
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoThe systems use lots of clever tricks, like floating paper and plastics away from metals with water or jets of air, or using eddy currents to push metals out of mixed waste. Here's one example: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-07/how-it-works-recycling-machines-separate-junk-type/ https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-07/how-it-wor...
- baybal2 6y agoI think current garbage sorting is waaay too inefficient, and this is fundamentally limits the recyclability rates. This is especially obvious when you talk about stuff made of a lot of different materials. Picking such things apart for different material streams is impossible to scale. I was thinking, what if governments were mandating mandatory chemical tagging of all common materials, so you can just shred everything, and then separate materials using machines which can distinguish chemical tags.
- lallysingh 6y agoI think it might be easier to just have machines learn to recognize the top 99.9% of all things thrown away and leave the rest to a a small group (or landfill).
- londons_explore 6y agoThis seems like the obvious solution. I bet a database of 100,000 products would cover the vast majority of all waste worldwide. If you can make a machine to sort those things into 100,000 (virtual) piles, you can then have a specific way to handle each type of thing. Each manufacturer of those goods can decide how to handle their "pile", and if they design for recyclability, it's going to be easier and cheaper for them. If they can just say "combine our product with these other products made from the same material" that'll work out cheapest. If their answer is "our product contains a mix of various toxic stuff" then they're going to have to pay for some specialist to handle it... In every location this 'pile' exists in every city... The only place this system doesn't work is for products that change state significantly during consumer use - for example a candle gets mostly burnt away, but the remaining blobs of wax are probably untracable to the original manufacturer.
- baybal2 6y agoThe problem, as I stated above, is that you will be landfilling significantly more than 0.01%. There are tons of unrecyclable stuff in regular household garbage. For example, a packaging made of two incompatible in recycling methods plastics are a waste.
- lallysingh 6y agoI'm describing an approach to sorting. Your response isn't about sorting.
- tomc1985 6y agoWhat about waste vaporization? There are far fewer things that are sensitive to being vaporized (meaning far less sorting needed) and the outputs are far cleaner.