The Sanford and Son Salvage Economy: Landfill Sites Are Being Viewed as Mines with Buried Riches
August 28th, 2008Good luck with that.
Via: IHT:
Inspired by high oil prices, a sharp rise in the value of old plastic is encouraging waste companies across the world to dig for buried riches in rotting garbage dumps.
Long a symbol of humanity’s throw-away culture, existing landfill sites are now being viewed as mines of potential that could also help bolster the planet’s dwindling natural resources as the world population grows.
“By 2020 we might have nine billion people on the planet, we could have a very big middle class driving millions more cars, and we could be in a really resource-hungry world with the oil price climbing and a supply situation in Libya, Russia and Saudi, where natural gas is limited,” said Peter Jones, a leading expert on waste management in Britain. “It is those drivers, those conditions, which will encourage the possibility of landfill mining.”
In Britain alone, experts say landfill sites could offer an estimated 200 million tons of old plastic – worth up to £60 billion, or $111 billion, at current prices – to be recovered and recycled, or converted to liquid fuel.
With many oil analysts predicting that oil prices will stay above $100 a barrel, waste experts in the United States, Europe and across Asia have been conducting pilot projects to recoup old plastic and other waste materials.
Related: The Rise of the Sanford and Son Global Economy: Urban Miners Look for Precious Metals in Cell Phones
I’m not busting your chops or anything such as that, but I am curious as to why you say, “Good luck with that.” Do you think it’s a bad idea?
I think it may be a good idea for recovering certain metal items that have been discarded, considering that there’s a finite amount of metal ores in the planetary crust, the reserves of which we can reach we are pretty close to exhausting. (I know the crust is comprised of five percent iron, but the iron ore we’re smelting these days is usually something like one to three percent actual iron.) However, a lot of today’s metals are very highly alloyed, and any such metal extracted from a landfill will be of very limited utility. When different alloys are melted together in an attempt to recycle them, I am told that you end up with a bunch of useless slag.