A new Welsh model could be the answer to managing post-consumer waste
One devolved nation’s trailblazing enterprise is another’s pilot – or so it should be
“If you really want to up your recycling rate,” suggests Lucy Siegel in her 2018 book Turning the Tide on Plastic, “move to Wales!” Indeed, it’s a pub quiz answer that might surprise a few people: Wales ranks third on the global top recyclers table.
The country’s journey to becoming a world-class recycler is impressive and demonstrates why strategic thinking is key in this area. In 1999, the year the Welsh National Assembly first convened, only 5 per cent of the country’s household waste was recycled. But by 2025, the country is set to hit its target of no more than 5 per cent going to landfill.
The odds are in Wales’s favour. There seems to be a consensus that well-set targets – long-term as well as interim short-term ones – are key to bringing about sea changes of this calibre.
In November 2020 there was cause for celebration across Wales when news of exceeding the statutory 64 per cent recycling rate by more than one per cent – and beating the UK target by 35 years – came. Especially so in the top three local authorities for recycling, which have already hit the 2025 level at more than 70 per cent, well ahead of schedule.
The country’s success is well-deserved, as it has been firing on all cylinders for the past 20 years to pull the feat off. In addition to setting targets and drawing roadmaps, the Welsh government has also invested generously in recycling facilities, circular economy initiatives and attitude-changing campaigns. So what are the key ingredients of this secret Welsh recipe?
Mean it!
The Welsh government’s approach is unique in that it goes “beyond recycling”, which is also the name of its new circular economy programme, launched in March 2021.
The concept that sustainable waste management is not just about increasing recycling capacity and developing revolutionary – and often energy-intensive – new technologies but also, and pre-eminently, about “keeping resources in use and avoiding waste” – more reminiscent of grassroot environmentalist thinking than the usual government schemes.
The longer household appliances and electronic products are in use, the less packaging needs to be tackled. Setting up re-use shops and repair cafes near household waste recycling centres (HWRCs) can divert a lot of items from energy-to-waste recycling by giving them an extended or a new lease of life.
The way the Welsh government has introduced a moratorium on the building of large-scale energy-for-waste plants with immediate effect is another sign that it means business.
Burning waste for energy is at least an improvement on plain incineration, but we can do far better. Here, again, the Welsh department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has embraced a cause that environmentalist groups such as Bin the Burners have already been making a case for: reduce unrecyclable waste first and then build burners only if you still need them.
Put your money where your mouth is
Working towards a circular economy doesn’t come cheap. Wales has spent £1 billion since 2000 solely on providing financial support for local authorities to improve their waste collection services.
Introducing electric waste collection vehicles or managing as many as 20 different waste streams are measures that eat into budgets. So is replacing standard 240-litre wheelie bins with considerably smaller ones, a desperate move that recycling underachiever Cardiff made in 2015 to improve residents’ waste selection habits.
The Circular Economy Fund encouraging businesses to increase their use of recycled materials in their products or packaging has been recently expanded by £3.2 million in addition to the £6.5 million granted previously.
Play hardball!
But targets and roadmaps will go up in smoke and funds will get squandered unless the legislation underlying them is enforced. This is less of a problem in Wales, where councils are under enormous pressure to deliver – as evidenced by the above example, as Cardiff Council faces fines of up to £2 million for failing to meet statutory targets.
To shift some of this burden, councils are imposing penalties on their residents if they find their plastic collection for recycling is not up to standard due to contamination. Incurring a hefty penalty for leaving your recycling bag beside a recycling bank is not uncommon.
These sanctions might sound rather draconian and may spur the less environmentally conscious to leave Wales rather than move there. Many struggle to squeeze their non-recyclable waste into the bags provided by councils tri-weekly.
On the upside, however, those who are serious about consumer responsibility and punctilious in their shopping choices can rest assured that their efforts will eventually not be in vain.
The site myrecyclingwales, which tells visitors how much waste has been collected by a particular local council and where it ends up, is debunking the received wisdom that selective waste collection is pointless.
Those who think that the Welsh scheme entails too much citizen effort, argues Siegle – too many sticks and not enough carrots – may find inspiration in the fact that better collection means cleaner recycles, which in turn means more money for the council, which, in a good scenario, can trickle back to residents in the form of lower taxes.
The post-Brexit UK Environmental Bill 2021 sets targets and allocates funds necessary for making a greener UK a reality, which the sustainable management of post-consumer waste is an important pillar of. It also undertakes to review the developments in environmental legislation globally every two years. But taking a closer look at the regulations, best practices and mistakes of the recycling champion in its front yard could be a good example to follow.
Zita Goldman
I'm a climate scientist – here's three key things I have learned over a year of Covid-19
The planet had already warmed by around 1.2℃ since pre-industrial times when the World Health Organization officially declared a pandemic on March 11 2020. This began a sudden and unprecedented drop in human activity, as much of the world went into lockdown and factories stopped operating, cars kept their engines off and planes were grounded.
There have been many monumental changes since then, but for those of us who work as climate scientists this period has also brought some entirely new and sometimes unexpected insights.
Here are three things we have learned:
1. Climate science can operate in real time
The pandemic made us think on our feet about how to get around some of the difficulties of monitoring greenhouse gas emissions, and CO₂ in particular, in real time. When many lockdowns were beginning in March 2020, the next comprehensive Global Carbon Budget setting out the year’s emissions trends was not due until the end of the year. So climate scientists set about looking for other data that might indicate how CO₂ was changing.
We used information on lockdown as a mirror for global emissions. In other words, if we knew what the emissions were from various economic sectors or countries pre-pandemic, and we knew by how much activity had fallen, we could assume that their emissions had fallen by the same amount.
By May 2020, a landmark study combined government lockdown policies and activity data from around the world to predict a 7% fall in CO₂ emissions by the end of the year, a figure later confirmed by the Global Carbon Project. This was soon followed by research by my own team, which used Google and Apple mobility data to reflect changes in ten different pollutants, while a third study again tracked CO₂ emissions using data on fossil fuel combustion and cement production.
The latest Google mobility data shows that although daily activity hasn’t yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, it has recovered to some extent. This is reflected in our latest emissions estimate, which shows, following a limited bounce back after the first lockdown, a fairly steady growth in global emissions during the second half of 2020. This was followed by a second and smaller dip representing the second wave in late 2020/early 2021.
Meanwhile, as the pandemic progressed, the Carbon Monitor project established methods for tracking CO₂ emissions in close to real time, giving us a valuable new way to do this kind of science.
2. No dramatic effect on climate change
In both the short and long term, the pandemic will have less effect on efforts to tackle climate change than many people had hoped.
Despite the clear and quiet skies, research I was involved in found that lockdown actually had a slight warming effect in spring 2020: as industry ground to a halt, air pollution dropped and so did the ability of aerosols, tiny particles produced by the burning of fossil fuels, to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. The impact on global temperatures was short-lived and very small (just 0.03°C), but it was still bigger than anything caused by lockdown-related changes in ozone, CO₂ or aviation.
Looking further ahead to 2030, simple climate models have estimated that global temperatures will only be around 0.01°C lower as a result of Covid-19 than if countries followed the emissions pledges they already had in place at the height of the pandemic. These findings were later backed up by more complex model simulations.
Many of these national pledges have been updated and strengthened over the past year, but they still aren’t enough to avoid dangerous climate change, and as long as emissions continue we will be eating into the remaining carbon budget. The longer we delay action, the steeper the emissions cuts will need to be.
3. This isn’t a plan for climate action
The temporary halt to normal life we have now seen with successive lockdowns is not only not enough to stop climate change, it is also not sustainable: like climate change, Covid-19 has hit the most vulnerable the hardest. We need to find ways to reduce emissions without the economic and social impacts of lockdowns, and find solutions that also promote health, welfare and equity. Widespread climate ambition and action by individuals, institutions and businesses is still vital, but it must be underpinned and supported by structural economic change.
Colleagues and I have estimated that investing just 1.2% of global GDP in economic recovery packages could mean the difference between keeping global temperature rise below 1.5°C, and a future where we are facing much more severe impacts – and higher costs.
Unfortunately, green investment is not being made at anything like the level needed. However, many more investments will be made over the next few months. It’s essential that strong climate action is integrated into future investments. The stakes may seem high, but the potential rewards are far higher.
Piers Forster, Professor of Physical Climate Change; Director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The world’s first cross supply chain orchestrator
TRI-VIZOR is a disruptive innovator in logistics and supply chain management. As the world’s first impartial orchestrator it was one of the first companies to introduce the principles of the sharing economy in transport and logistics, supported by its baseline “Carpooling for Cargo”. TRI-VIZOR proactively designs and operates horizontal partnerships and collaborative communities among shippers. By bundling and synchronising freight flows and sharing capacity and resources across multiple supply networks, double digit gains in cost, customer service and sustainability can be achieved.
Vision and mission
TRI-VIZOR has developed a strong vision on how logistics and supply chain management will evolve in the coming years and wants to prepare companies and other organisations to anticipate what is to come. In essence, the current business models in transport and logistics will fail very soon due to low efficiencies caused by fragmentation and important capacity shortages. The new business models for smart and sustainable logistics will be based on sharing capacity – for example, in bundling of flows, clustering of activities, sharing services and pooling resources. TRI-VIZOR has demonstrated that horizontal partnerships and platforms are the most fair and appropriate way to realise this.
Track record
TRI-VIZOR was originally a spin-off company of the University of Antwerp, founded in 2008. The two founding partners of TRI-VIZOR, Alex Van Breedam and Bart Vannieuwenhuyse, have individually gained global recognition as innovators and experts in horizontal collaboration.
TRI-VIZOR has since collected an impressive track record of prizes and awards. Its reputation and recognition is to a great extent due to a strong focus on its mission to set up and operate horizontal collaborations. It has grown to the leading reference for horizontal collaboration projects – it is the world’s first cross supply chain orchestrator. TRI-VIZOR’s knowledge base is the result of ten years of coping with challenging and complex collaboration projects. These projects were conducted with leading global companies such as P&G, Nike, Baxter, UCB, WabCo, Hologic, Pfizer, Novartis, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Donaldson, Jindal, Omya, Agfa, Unilever, SCA, Delhaize, Sony, Panasonic, Intersnack, JSP, Ferrero, Ontex, Kimberly-Clark, Autogrill, Takeda, Cargill and Skretting.
TRI-VIZOR has also established very close relationships with public authorities and organisations, including cities, ports and regional and European authorities. Some of the major deliverables of projects with public authorities were anti-trust compliant legal frameworks with models and guidelines for horizontal collaboration. TRI-VIZOR is also closely involved within Alice (Alliance for Logistics Innovation through Collaboration in Europe) and the development of the Physical Internet, the endgame for the future of logistics. The successful horizontal collaboration projects setup by TRI-VIZOR are considered as the first embryos of the Physical Internet.
Roles
In its role as neutral orchestrator, TRI-VIZOR prepares (as the “initiator”), involves, and supports companies in the processes of creating (as “architect”) and managing (as the “trustee”) horizontal collaboration partnerships and platforms.
As a community manager, TRI-VIZOR innovates in a variety of eco-systems and their governance.
For more information, please visit www.trivizor.com
by Bart Vannieuwenhuyse and Alex Van Breedam, founders of TRI-VIZOR NV
Plastic pollution: how chemical recycling technology could help fix it
It’s impossible to imagine everyday life without plastics. Lightweight, durable and cheap, these materials outperform many others in a diverse range of applications.
Plastics have brought about positive change in ways we often overlook. For example, the development of plastic components in electronic devices, such as the one you’re using to read this article, means we’ve never been more connected to the world around us.
But our love of plastics has come at an environmental cost. It’s been estimated that of the 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic made between 1950 to 2015, over 75% is now waste, with 79% accumulating in either landfill or the natural environment.
For scale, that’s more than all living things on Earth, and our oceans are drowning in plastic. Because of this, recent research efforts have focused on addressing these mounting environmental concerns. One of these is chemical recycling.
The value of plastic
To overcome the huge environmental concerns created by plastic we need to start valuing plastic waste as a resource. After all, plastic waste contains value in the form of stable chemical bonds, so at the very least we should try to recover that energy. In fact, the stability of these bonds is why plastics linger for so long in the environment.
Beyond burning plastic to recover this energy, we can also recycle plastic. The world currently relies on mechanical recycling, where plastics are sorted, melted and remoulded to create mainly lower-grade plastic products. But this process is limited. The harsh conditions involved mean each time a piece of plastic is recycled, its performance properties are negatively affected. This limits the number of times a piece of plastic can be recycled.
To make sure plastic keeps its value in the long term, we need alternative recycling strategies. Chemical recycling provides the potential for infinite recyclability. But the challenge lies in achieving it in a sustainable and economic way at scale. Traditional methods are usually costly and energy or resource intensive, which has limited their widespread use.
Chemical recycling
Plastics are made up of long-chain molecules known as polymers, which consist of smaller repeating building blocks called monomers. These monomers come in different shapes and sizes, and the bonding between them determines the plastic’s material properties – such as melting temperature and toughness – which affects the way it is used.
While mechanical recycling involves melting, chemical recycling relies on a chemical transformation and thus breaking the links between monomers. Chemical recycling breaks the plastic down at a molecular level. This means the monomer can be recovered in what’s called closed-loop recycling or the plastic waste can be transformed into other higher-value chemicals in open-loop recycling. For many types of plastic, it’s possible to recover monomers or other useful materials.
Some plastics, such as polyolefins – the material in a polyethylene plastic bag – don’t have weak monomer links, making it harder to chemically recycle them. In such cases, a process called pyrolysis is used, a different process to burning, which relies on high reaction temperatures to typically produce fuels and waxes.
Catalysis
Catalysts are used in around 90% of industrial chemical processes. They make the process more efficient by providing the reaction with an alternative route, much like the way Google maps optimises your journey. They can also allow us to be selective about what product is created and reduce waste. Such benefits are central to ensuring chemical recycling can be performed both sustainably and economically at an industrial scale.
The enzymes that were working tirelessly during your last meal are naturally occurring catalysts that play an important role in digestion. Enzymes that can even break down plastics have been reported.
However, these processes are limited by their productivity and require specific process conditions – such as the right temperature and pH – to keep the enzyme active. But given how rapidly the field is advancing, using naturally occurring catalysts may be commercially viable in the future.
We’ve developed highly efficient metal-based catalysts for the chemical recycling of polylactic acid (PLA), a plastic made from plant starch. This work used cheap and abundant metals – such as zinc or magnesium – targeting chemicals called lactate esters, which are a potential green alternative to petroleum-based solvents.
This area remains in its infancy, but we expect significant developments, particularly in process optimisation, to be made as the field gathers momentum. This is in fact a general endeavour of the field because traditional methods typically use harsh chemicals, and can be resource and energy intensive.
Beyond PLA, there is the potential to “up-cycle” other plastics, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is used for plastic bottles. Recent examples include building blocks for high-performance materials and antibiotics and corrosion inhibitors from PET waste.
Our recent work has also investigated the chemical recycling of PET, which is used far more extensively. PET is used more widely in plastic bottles and food containers, while PLA takes up a much smaller share of the market, used mostly for 3D printing, biomedical devices and certain packaging applications.
Looking ahead
Given societies diverse plastic use, a one-solution-fits-all approach is not feasible. Diverse and tailored recycling strategies are needed for both existing and new emerging plastics. However, commercial-scale chemical recycling operations are underway.
In the future, we expect chemical recycling to complement its mechanical counterpart, especially for difficult to recycle materials such as thin-films. One thing is for certain, plastics are here to stay. With production expected to exceed one billion tonnes by 2050, chemical recycling promises to be an exciting space to watch
Matthew Jones, Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of Bath, University of Bath and Jack Payne, PhD Candidate, Centre for Sustainable and Circular Technologies, University of Bath
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Five ways fungi could change the world, from cleaning water to breaking down plastics
Fungi — a scientific goldmine? Well, that’s what a review published today in the journal Trends in Biotechnology indicates. You may think mushrooms are a long chalk from the caped crusaders of sustainability. But think again.
Many of us have heard of fungi’s role in creating more sustainable leather substitutes. Amadou vegan leather crafted from fungal-fruiting bodies has been around for some 5,000 years.
More recently, mycelium leather substitutes have taken the stage. These are produced from the root-like structure mycelium, which snakes through dead wood or soil beneath mushrooms.
You might even know about how fungi help us make many fermented food and drinks such as beer, wine, bread, soy sauce and tempeh. Many popular vegan protein products, including Quorn, are just flavoured masses of fungal mycelium.
But what makes fungi so versatile? And what else can they do?
Show me foamy and flexible
Fungal growth offers a cheap, simple and environmentally friendly way to bind agricultural byproducts (such as rice hulls, wheat straw, sugarcane bagasse and molasses) into biodegradable and carbon-neutral foams.
Fungal foams are becoming increasingly popular as sustainable packaging materials; IKEA is one company that has indicated a commitment to using them.
Fungal foams can also be used in the construction industry for insulation, flooring and panelling. Research has revealed them to be strong competitors against commercial materials in terms of having effective sound and heat insulation properties.
Moreover, adding in industrial wastes such as glass fines (crushed glass bits) in these foams can improve their fire resistance.
And isolating only the mycelium can produce a more flexible and spongy foam suitable for products such as facial sponges, artificial skin, ink and dye carriers, shoe insoles, lightweight insulation lofts, cushioning, soft furnishings and textiles.
Paper that doesn’t come from trees? No, chitin
For other products, it’s the composition of fungi that matters. Fungal filaments contain chitin: a remarkable polymer also found in crab shells and insect exoskeletons.
Chitin has a fibrous structure, similar to cellulose in wood. This means fungal fibre can be processed into sheets the same way paper is made.
When stretched, fungal papers are stronger than many plastics and not much weaker than some steels of the same thickness. We’ve yet to test its properties when subject to different forces.
Fungal paper’s strength can be substituted for rubbery flexibility by using specific fungal species, or a different part of the mushroom. The paper’s transparency can be customised in the same way.
Growing fungi in mineral-rich environments results in inherent fire resistance for the fungus, as it absorbs the inflammable minerals, incorporating them into its structure. Add to this that water doesn’t wet fungal surfaces, but rolls off, and you’ve got yourself some pretty useful paper.
A clear solution to dirty water
Some might ask: what’s the point of fungal paper when we already get paper from wood? That’s where the other interesting attributes of chitin come into play — or more specifically, the attributes of its derivative, chitosan.
Chitosan is chitin that has been chemically modified through exposure to an acid or alkali. This means with a few simple steps, fungal paper can adopt a whole new range of applications.
For instance, chitosan is electrically charged and can be used to attract heavy metal ions. So what happens if you couple it with a mycelium filament network that is intricate enough to prevent solids, bacteria and even viruses (which are much smaller than bacteria) from passing through?
The result is an environmentally friendly membrane with impressive water purification properties. In our research, my colleagues and I found this material to be stable, simple to make and useful for laboratory filtration.
While the technology hasn’t yet been commercialised, it holds particular promise for reducing the environmental impact of synthetic filtration materials, and providing safer drinking water where it’s not available.
Mushrooms in modern medicine
Perhaps even more interesting is chitosan’s considerable biomedical potential. Fungal materials have been used to create dressings with active wound healing properties.
Although not currently on the market, these have been proven to have antibacterial properties, stem bleeding and support cell proliferation and attachment.
Fungal enzymes can also be used to combat bacteria active in tooth decay, enhance bleaching and destroy compounds responsible for bad breath.
Then there’s the well-known role of fungi in antibiotics. Penicillin, made from the Penicillium fungi, was a scientific breakthrough that has saved millions of lives and become a staple of modern healthcare.
Many antibiotics are still produced from fungi or soil bacteria. And in an age of increasing antibiotic resistance, genome sequencing is finally enabling us to identify fungi’s untapped potential for manufacturing the antibiotics of the future.
Mushrooms mending the environment
Fungi could play a huge role in sustainability by remedying existing environmental damage.
For example, they can help clean up contaminated industrial sites through a popular technique known as mycoremediation, and can break down or absorb oils, pollutants, toxins, dyes and heavy metals.
They can also compost some synthetic plastics, such as polyurethane. In this process, the plastic is buried in regulated soil and its byproducts are digested by specific fungi as it degrades.
These incredible organisms can even help refine bio fuels. Whether or not we go as far as using fungal coffins to decompose our bodies into nutrients for plants — well, that’s a debate for another day.
But one thing is for sure: fungi have the undeniable potential to be used for a whole range of purposes we’re only beginning to grasp.
It could be the beer you drink, your next meal, antibiotics, a new faux leather bag or the packaging that delivered it to you — you never know what form the humble mushroom will take tomorrow.
Mitchell P. Jones, Postdoctoral researcher, Vienna University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.