April 08.04.2012th, XNUMX - Landfill instead of mine - garbage as a lucrative source of raw materials
Recycling is becoming more and more attractive as a material source - especially with rising oil prices. Many processing plants are already lacking supplies: They are looking for material in old landfills.
When the price of oil rises, most companies groan. The Austrian-American company MBA Polymers is doing quite differently. The company makes plastics from recycled electronic waste such as mixers, telephones and televisions. “If the price of crude oil rises, conventionally manufactured plastics become more expensive. And interest in our products is growing, ”says Theo Bremer, Sales Manager at MBA Polymers Austria.
The more expensive crude oil or metals become, the more in demand are recycled raw materials. "Recycling is becoming more and more important," confirms Eric Rehbock, Managing Director of the Federal Association for Secondary Raw Materials and Disposal (BVSE). The packaging and construction industries are already largely relying on recycled material. In this country, glass bottles are made of 85 percent waste glass, paper 70 percent of waste paper. Half of steel and aluminum consist of supposed scrap. This was the result of projections by the BVSE. And the demand for the recycled raw materials is increasing: “Plastics, steel and precious metals are particularly in demand at the moment,” says Rehbock.
Bremer also confirms this trend. MBA Polymers has grown strongly over the past six years and now operates plants in the USA, Austria, China and England. “We recycle 140.000 tons of plastic annually,” says Bremer. This results in license plate holders and stamps, vacuum cleaners and coffee machines.
So far, however, the recycling industry has had a price problem: "Recycled raw materials are often more expensive than new products," says Carsten Eichert, managing director of the management consultancy Encros and an expert in resource management and recycling. Rising raw material prices counteracted this.
In the meantime, waste is recycled that has not yet been economically processed. Automakers use palladium for catalysts, which they extract from old printed circuit boards. Soon the prices for metals, plastics and rare earths reached such a high value, that even the recycling of small devices like mobile phones or razors would pay off, says Rehbock.
Old landfills as a new source
So-called urban mining should also be lucrative in the long term: huge amounts of metals are buried in old landfills. It is still too expensive to remove rubbish dumps and retrieve the valuable raw materials from the waste. "Rare earths are not rare enough for this," says Andreas Habel, an expert on electronic waste at BVSE.
Recycled raw materials already have one decisive advantage: They are more environmentally friendly than new products. "Plastics and ferrous metals from scrap cause around 50 percent less CO2 compared to primary production," says Thomas Pretz, head of the Institute for Processing and Recycling at RWTH Aachen University. With aluminum, even 95 percent could be saved.
The recycling industry has upgraded and has been investing in new processing plants and new technology for years. Local plant operators, however, have a problem: “They're short of scrap,” says Pretz. It is still cheaper for many companies to ship waste to Africa or Asia. According to UN estimates, 100.000 tons of electronic waste are illegally exported from Germany alone every year.
Pretz reports that there are up to 26 different metals in one electrical device. In Asia or Africa, however, only the most expensive, easy-to-recycle raw materials are removed from scrap. "There they are only interested in the roughly one hundred grams of gold that are in a ton of electronic waste." Most of the remaining metals were lost. Processing plants in Europe, on the other hand, could recycle all metals. That is why associations such as the BVSE are currently calling on politicians to enforce a scrap export ban in the EU. That would benefit the recycling industry in Germany.
(Financial Times Deutschland - by Raphael Zelter and Sibylle Schikora)
