MATERIAL AND RE-USE
German Helmets turned into pots after 2nd World War
SUMMARY 1 / Global issues of actual economy /
3 / Solutions : made in local, share it global /
Scale down : Be closer in the production, then in the collect, in the recovery, in the re-use, in the communication.
Miss of local ressilience
Opacity of extraction/production in emerging contries in order to hide : Lack environmental regulations. Bad working conditions.
Exploit the potential of the object to the maximum : Smarter production. In the sens of a smarter Recovery.
2 / Cities trend to reject production and recovery units toward the outskirt and even further /
4 / Proposal applied on the Study case of Barcelona city /
Local production : Open source and Urban mining.
Historical and cultural inheritage of the cities.
Recycling represent a too few part of the end of objects. Leaks in the life cycle of manufactured objects creating global issues : Pollution by incineration, by landfilling, by rejection in ocean. E waste and black market.
Metrics related to wastes in Barcelona.
Study of wastes treatments possibilities of implementation. Proposal.
and
INTRO
In 2014, ONU demography studies showed that 54% of the global population live in urban areas, and it would increase to reach 66% in 2050. Those values underlined the fact that a good planification of urban areas is the main challenge of the 21st century, as it was mentioned by John Wilmoth, director of the demographic division of ONU. Nowadays, cities are considered as main consumers of matter. The actual economic system is based on a global network where the raw matter is extracted in different parts of the globe which are specialized in those sort of fields, then manufactured in other places and used principaly inside cities of all around the world. The production of objects is splitted between a bunch of specialized different actors from the extraction of the raw matterials to the purchase of the manufactured product by customers. The actual globalisation of the economy opened the marked to the entire world, establishing a competion between actors of the same field but from different places of all around the world. Even though politics, regulations, sociological system, economical system or working system, which regulate the work of those actors, are not equivalent, the market laws dominate other logics. The most competitive gets the monopoly. In this way, the production of one single object can involve a plethora of actors located in many places of the globe.
Global issues of actual economy Taking into account all the materials, components and objects moves before being finally purchased, issues relating to the actual global ecomic system are poping up. In a period of awareness concerning the human footprint on the global environment, the large scale model of production in within which we are has to raise some questions in terms of waste of energy, but also of transparency in the production process. What is making the global scale production model more widespread than the local scale production model? We are actually in a period when the cost of the energy used for the transportation plus the cost of the production (in certain countries) is lower than the cost of the local production. Indeed, some emerging countries allowed to access to a very cheap labor which makes those countries more than competitive worldwide. Moreover developped countries, after having intensly produced for their own interests during decades, start to become really concerned by the environmental issues. Thus, they reinforced the hardness of the control onto production field in order to prevent environmental impacts of those activities.
However, even though the economical system is global, the regulations are applied independently by country. For this reason, some countries (mostly emerging countries) are taking advantage of their permisive regulations and propose very lost-cost production or extraction by using cheap, unsafe and polluting processes unfriendly for the environment and for human beings. For instance, some textile dyes or toxic chemicals treatment used in the textile industry are forbidden in Europe. But a recent Greenpeace analyse revealed a worrying rate of prohibited chemicals in fashion products produced by famous brands such as C&A, Mango, Levi’s, Zara, Calvin Klein which are distributed in countries all around the world. An other fact concerns the past important extraction of rare earths which occured in mountain pass, United States. In 1998, chemical processing at the mine was stopped after a series of wastewater leaks. In 2009, China supplied more than 96% of the rare earths used in the world. Since 2007 China has restricted exports of rare earths and imposed export tariffs, both to conserve resources and to give preference to Chinese manufacturers. As rare earths are essential in order to make our technological devices working, China control a big part of the global economy by having the monopoly on the rare earths supplying.
Which is the price of this worldwide monopoly?
We suppose to be aware of the actual global situation. Buying products manufactured in that conditions means that we agree with the way in which it was made. By taking a look at the industrial practices which occur in some hyper-productive countries we can easily understand the interest of certain factories for keeping blury the tracking of components or raw materials used in their production.
The actual mass-production system expended to the global scale brings a lot of issues in terms of economy, environmental protection and human being protection. In some countries where the poverty rate is extremely high we observe huge rural exodus of people trying to survive by doing any lucartive activity. Since the cost of life, the average of salary, the level of social rights and hardness of regulations (protection of workers, protection of environment) are still very low compared to developped countries, big firms provide very bad and intense working condition for their labors in order to be as competitive as they can in the worldwide economy. Secondly, this economical system creats global scale monopoly of countries for the extraction or the production in certain fields and thus dependency of other countries in the other hand. Which means that developped countries have relocalised some of their industrial activities for economic purposes and by doing that they reduced their own economical resiliency. Also, even though some countries seems really involved in the development of precise regulations in order to reduce the human impact on the environment, the open global market removed all the efforts by shifting those issues in less restrictive countries. This relocalisation system of unclean production allows people to keep access to the objects they desire and in the same time it saves the environmental friendly image of the developed countries. Moreover, the perfect mastery of the media tool is the main activity of the major actors of this system who are biggest firms of the global economy. They make all their best in order to keep a favorable opacity in industrial processes occuring in those countries.
This situation can not remain the same. We already observe the consequencies of the actual mass-production global model with a huge increase pollution rate in some intense production regions of the world, and meanwhile an increase of cancers rate in the some areas. We also faced to diverse environmental disasters or other catastrophes. We must achieve more transparency and more equity in the global production system, find alternatives at the local scale to get more economic resiliency for each country.
Cities trend to reject production and recovery units toward the outskirt and even further The phenomenum of cities attraction that actually occurs makes necessary a certain kind of density in order to avoid a too big expansion of urban areas. Although, the mass production is the favorite economical model of our time. And this way to produce needs very big spaces to be efficient which doesn’t match with the actual density necessities of cities and the increase of the cost of urban space occupations. Moreover production fields inherited of the bad image that left the excesses of industrial periode in cities of western countries. In people mind it remains linked to negative notions such as alienation, pollution, insalubrity, dust, dirt, which turned cities in unfriendly environments and made people rejected urban areas for suburb areas. In order to bring people back to city centers the policies of the next period were to provide the relocalisation of the production (manufactured products or energies) and the extraction units outside cities. Then even outside the countries as we can actually see. The damned modern zonning model, which aimed to split physically working areas from living areas, was the most followed urban model in western countries during the XXth century. It was allowed by the democratisation of automobiles as the main way of transportation. The result of this way of thinking the city creats those kind of huge areas only dedicated for production or logistic units in the outskirt of cities, in dirrect connection with transport infrastructures. Those spaces are activated during the daytime and completly dead out of workingtime and during the weekend. In addition to this miss of extra fonctions those areas benefit of smoother urban and architectural regulations in order to foster the implantation of production units.
This low level of constraints leads to a systematic use of very simple volumes, with as few openings as possible, wrapped in very poor materials which deteriorates quickly. Those volumes are implanted in the middle of big parkings and the public space is formalised by the transportation needs. The human dimension of those areas is reduced to its minimum, only the functional aspect remains. This situation is not in favor of an improvement of the production units image from the people point of view. Those facts are some important arguments which explain the actual tendency for urban areas to reject production or extraction plants in their outskirt.
Mixed urban pattern from the 19th century Zonning urban pattern from the 20th century
As we already mentionned, the urban model is becoming more and more attractive. In 2014, we passed over the half of the global population which is living in an urban area. Indeed, cities are symbol of better life, or easier life : easy access to work, to facilities, to services, to social contacts, to events, to manufactured products so easy access to the consumption. Since the city-way-of-life became the most popular of the globe, cities became the biggest consumers of manufactured products. And in the same time as the city is fed by an oversized global production it rejects all kind of physical production or recovery plants outside its own area. Cities are turning into huge starving freak of products expelling even its own production of waste beyond its walls. Nowadays, it is very difficult to get precise values about the consumption or the production which is happening in cities. There are no precise indexes available relating to the inputs or outputs for cities. Most of the indexes are related to the countries. Since objects enter inside the country, they move freely. But for the reasons we already evoked, we know that most of the cities in developped countries are widely more consumers than producers. But in a reverse manner, they produce a huge amount of waste from used products, packaging, energetic consumption and also organic waste. Those waste are collected by different ways according to the features of wastes (size, material, level of complexity in the treatment, toxicity...).
To understand better we can focus on the case of the city of Barcelona for instance. In 2011, Barcelona produced 804 921 tonnes of municipal waste. Among which 37,9% were collected in a selective way in order to be recycled. This is just a little bit more than the national average wich is around 33% for the same periode.
WASTES TREATMENT IN EUROPE IN 2011. Recycling Incineration Landfill
Germany Netherlands Belgium Sweden Austria Denmark Luxembourg France Finland Italy UK Ireland Spain Slovenia Portugal Czech Republic Hungary Estonia Poland Slovakia Cyprus Greece Latvia Lithuania Croatia Malta Bulgaria Romania 0%
20%
40%
60%
80% 100%
However, we condider that only a part of the collected waste are going to achieve a recycling plant. For instance, in Europe the part of electronic wastes which end in an official recycling plant represent 67%. Nevertheless, wastes in any sort represent a huge potential of recovery. Indeed, all the energy put in the transformation of the raw materials, from the design study to the end of the manufacturing steps, gave such a strength to the final object which has to be considered as an added value for the object. This is not only a matter of the final price of the object, this is also a matter of energy, material and human work which are essential in any production. But those values are completly removed by the opacity and the efficiency of the dominant actual economic system based on a global scale mass-production which is able to provide big quantity of manufactured products at very competitive prices.
We are actually in a time when the awareness of countries is increasing regarding to this critical situation. More and more efforts are done by cities in order to collect efficiently the citizen wastes, and then take advantage of their potential of recovery. But still, the part of the collected and then recovered products is very little. Why cities are collecting so few amont of waste to be recover?
By having a look on the recycling system of Barcelona we can figure out some issues relating to the actual model. This model is constituted of 4 layers of waste collection which occur at differents scales and for different purposes. The first one is the closest to the citizen. It is located in almost every street of the city and it is formed by a bunch of large format outside bins colored according to the kind of collect it carries (organic, plastic, cans, paper). The only interaction between the collection and the citizen are some icons.
The second one is a mobil waste collection truck which stops at precise locations in the district only once a week. They can carry bigger objects or other kinds such as electrical devices, clothes... But they don’t take special toxic waste or furniture... The third has the same function as the mobil waste collection truck but it is a fix building. We can find those by one unit per district. The fourth is a dump, one unit per zone on the below map.
Zona Barrio Mobil
After being collected in differents points of the city, wastes are led towards the recycling plants located in the outskirt of the city. As we know, a part of the collected waste will be recycled in those areas, but major part are going to be lanfilled, polluting ground, underground and water streams for millennia. An another part is incinerated in order to creat energy from waste. This system represent a significant part of the waste management but it is very polluting : rejection of toxic smokes, production of toxic dust which are very often landfilled. A very small part is brought to composting plant. It concerns only organic wastes. The purpose is to creat compost and biogaz from organic waste. But for now the issues concerning the rejection of strong annoying smells doesn’t allow to locate those plants inside the city. An other issue of the XXIst century is the E-Wastes management. We know that in 2012, 48 894 tonnes of E-waste were generated in the world, among which only 24,5% were collected. But as we said previously collected doesn’t mean recycled. Thus, in 2014 the amount of E-waste collected was about 817 Kt, whereas the amount of E-Waste recycled was only 158 Kt for 2010. However, this phenomenum underlines an interresting aspect of issues relating to the way cities are collecting wastes. The distance between the citizen (consumer) and the treatment areas is too big, there are too many intermediates, there is no any visual contact among people and waste they produce, no information, no communication about it, no clear value, no knowledges shared.
ECOPARC 4 ECOPARC 2
ECOPARC 3
BARCELONA
ECOPARC 1
Sorting plant Dumping area Composting plant The only step of the waste management which is in contact with cityzens is the collection. Then, waste leaves the city area to be treated far from the city center in some kind of huge blind buildings. From this analyse, we can extrapolate that cities are sort of ashame of their oversized usual consumption, and they make their best to avoid people to become aware of their own production of waste for fear of turning their profite down.Thus, for cityzens, recycling keeps its abstract image. It remains a blurry concept which is supposed to bring a positive effect.
But this positive result can be seen only by watching evolution of environmental values. By being extremly disconnected from the treatment of their own waste, people miss of interrest for recycling purposes and they don’t feel concerned about this topic. This statement is an argument which in part explains the unpopularity of recycling and the reason for why most of the countries don’t achieve efficient rate of recycling waste.
RAW MATTER
RAW MATTER ENERGY
INCINERATION RECYCLING
MANUFACTURING
An other fact is the black market which occurs, mostly in the field of E-wastes. Indeed, electronical devices are full of precious matterials such as gold, silver, rare earths, bronze, copper, brass... For exemple, we can say that in 50 000 mobil phones we can find 1Kg Or + 10Kg Arg + Rare Earths... And due to the multiplication of steps between the collect of E-waste and the treatment, some devices are going out of the cycle. They can be stolen, re-sold on the black market to unofficial scarp dealers or even sent to other countries and then teared down in order to pick up the reussable precious materials or components. This practice is quite popular in some emerging countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Benin, Senegal, China... for the same raisons as the mass-production is relocalized in emerging countries : the profit of international firms.
RECYCLING
ILLEGAL EXPORTATION
USE USED OBJECT
LANDFILL
FUNCTIONING OBJECT
USED OBJECT
Indeed, when someone buy an electronic device, there is an additional charge which corresponds at the cost of the recovery process of the used product. Thus, as soon as the product doesn’t work anymore, any firm selling electronical devices must accept the old device back for free in order to send it towards an official recycling or recovery plant. Indeed, when someone buy an electronic device, there is an additional charge which corresponds at the cost of the recovery process of the used product. Thus, as soon as the product doesn’t work anymore, any firm selling electronical devices must accept the old device back for free in order to send it towards an official recycling or recovery plant. But, since those firms are motivated by the profit, they prefer to sell it at unofficial scarp dealers or external black market. In the second case, devices are brought in some huge open air dumps where poor labors and children work without protection, surrounded by toxic smokes and chemicals, in order to extract precious materials.
MANUFACTURING
USE FUNCTIONING OBJECT
Huge environmental damages are resulting of this phenomenum. Moreover, since emerging countries access more and more to technologies, and since developed countries are still based on the same mass consumption economic system, the amount of electronical waste increase endlessly, and with it, the environmental impact of our way of consuming. To conclude, if the political ideal of the recycling looks like the left diagram, the actual situation looks more like the right one.
Proposal applied on the Barcelona city The recent observations showed that the actual linear system of mass production, in which main actors are located outside the city and even outside the country, associated with the mass consumption, which occurs principaly in the urban areas, presents many issues in terms of environmental protection, ressources consumption, economical resiliency, social balance and human being protection. For all those reasons, the actual model has to be reconsidered. Thus, in order to prevent a more efficient local resiliency, it is crucial to foster a signifiant local production. The actual global production and consumption model cannot remain the only alternative. As cities host more and more people, we can’t imagine those areas conserving this unproductivity in terms of manufactured products and treatment of their own waste production. The previously evoked issue of making fit within the urban fabric the production program, which usually requires big spaces, could be solved by the development of new technologies or new productive areas such as Fab Labs. Based on a global comunity model, those places are open to the public and provide ways to produce their own objects (or those shared on the global comunity network) by using advanced technologies of CNC machine, 3D printer, Laser cut, arduino, but also more traditional tools.
We consider them both as a place of fabrication (Fab) and experimentation (Lab) which make of Fab Lab spaces of creation. Thanks to a wider global open sources network, creative ideas can be shared and freely replicated in any place of the world. They are florishing in the middle of our city, in close relationship with cityzens. Thus they could represent a local alternative production within our cities. An other other fact is the democratisation of new technologies of production in our own living places plus the development of shared open sources networks. Anyone can buy, or build his own 3D printer for personal purposes and at affordable prices. Even, blue prints of advanced technology machines could be found as open source. Which makes able those personal productive instruments to self replicate themself. The place of production areas in the urban fabric is thus solved since productive advanced tools are spread and hosted within our homes. Therefore, this new model could allow to make only datas moving globally whereas the production remains local.
Global data cloud
Then, the other obvious issue linked to the necessity of developing the local production is the presence, at the local scale, of raw materials or basic components entring in the fabrication of manufactured products. Indeed, in order to improve the resiliency of local areas in an efficiently way, cities have to become more self sufficient in terms of access to the raw materials and basic components. However, every city is not systematically matching with the location of raw materials deposit. For this reason, the local production has to rely on a very efficient and careful use of the urban mining which is an important source wealth on their own area. The urban mining concept can be explained by the fact that mass-consumption which dominates our economy so far already created huge amount of used manufactured products. Those objects constituted an important source of wealth for cities. Indeed, they are made out of precious materials by an expert larbor following a design, set by other experts. Following the idea and the necessity of local production, the concept of urban mining has to be considered in a more accurate way. Abundant precious material and objects with capabilities are already present in the city. We do need to take advantage of our previous oversized consumption.we already made, the actual system has to be improved.
Local recovered materials 60%
Whenever, the raw materials are the only things that can be recovered, solutions have to be developed in order to scale down the program of recycling plants. Indeed, it is a main matter of our time to be able to extract efficiently raw materials from amount of waste already produced. The goal is to achieve the maximum rate of recovered materials. For this purpose, some open initiatives provide to access at manners to implement recycling processes at small scale, or dirrectly at home. For instance, the precious plastic initiative aims to creat a comunity of creators within which creative ideas can be freely shared in order to prevent the rejection of plastic materials in the nature. The project propose a free access to the blue prints of a bunch machines for a small scale treatment of plastics objects. It provides tutorial in order to bring knowledges to people for starting their own experiments. And all the machines are affordable for less than 200euros. This allows people to creat their own design objects for their everyday uses or make their own 3D printing base materials.
Since electronical devices countains a lot of different precious materials, we should be able to take them out in order to re-use them. The problem is that extraction processes are still very polluting or they damage the rest of the materials which become then useless. For instance, the extraction of gold countained in electronic chips or PCB is processed by using chemical and toxic method such as «aqua regia» or «nitrics» which dissolve all the rest of the materials. Which means that once the process is done it is still necessary to take the gold out of the solution plus the solution is getting quickly saturated. However, some alternatives already exist in that sens. Stephen Foley and his team of searchers found new way to extract gold from used components devices : «We use one of the most mass-produced chemicals: acetic acid; at five per cent concentration it’s plain table vinegar.» To highlight the improvement Foley’s solution presents, consider that it costs 1520$ to extract one kilogram of gold using aqua regia and results in 5000 litres of waste. With the U of S solution it costs 66$ to produce one kilogram of gold and results in 100 litres of waste that can be reused over again.
The other main advantage over current recycling processes is that this specific solution is gold selective, meaning it only dissolves gold not other base metals, like copper, nickel, iron and cobalt, found in printed circuit boards. The gold extraction is done under very mild conditions while the solution dissolves gold with the fastest rate ever recorded. «Gold is stripped out from circuits in about 10 seconds leaving the other metals intact» Foley said. Thus, using less dangerous and less polluting chemicals, but also being a highly efficient process, this Foley discovery could be spread in some facilities within the urban fabric. Meanwhile, mostly Japan, as well as other countries of the word, are improving processes of recycling rare earths from electronic waste. But still, those systems are very descrutive. Talking about organic wastes. As other kind of wastes produced by the cities, they are treated in big plants located in the outskirt of the city. This location is required for the same reasons as already mentioned : the mass treatment needs big areas, plus, there is not a wish of facing both oversized consumption and production of waste occuring within cities. In a similar way, this system of centralized treatment located in some defined points of the surburbs, bring problems of energy wasted for the transportation. Nevertheless, the mass treatment used for organic wastes of the whole city doesn’t allow to integrate it inside the city network because of the big area it requires in order to store the received wastes. Moreover, this kind of plants present an other kind of individual issue : the smell. The big size concentration of organic wastes in the same place, for the purpose of composting, rejects very strong smell.
...
Considering Barcelona as a study case. Which are the relevant values in order to elaborate a strategy able to reduce the issues related to wastes?
Others : 8.6% Dumps : 3.6%
Green points : 2.4% Commerces : 7.8%
In terms of statistics Barcelona shows that in 2015, the population in the city is about : 1 604 555. On the metropolitan area de Barcelona the production of municipal waste is about : 1 401 390,56 tonnes. The waste production per capita is about 1,19 kg/person/day, and 0.46 Kg/person/day end within the selective collecting system. The selective collection represents still only about 34%.
Commerces : 7.8%
In 2011, the household’s wastes represented 75,3% over the total of wastes collected in the city of Barcelona. Thus, we can easily understand the importance of the well management of wastes produced by households in order to make any significant improvement regarding to the actual situation.
Households : 75%
COLLECTION TYPES AS A PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL WASTE IN 2011.
Moreover, as shown in the diagram of the proportion of sorted wastes recorded by sorting plants in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, the range and the diversity of the materials contained in those wastes is very important. It must be considered as a significant source of material and potential for further uses.
As already mentioned, the actual waste treatment system of Barcelona is based on a centralized model, whithin which only the collect occurs at the city scale. Then, treatments take place in big size plants located in the outskirt of the city. The waste treatments are then provided at the metropolitan area scale. This way to process is not without consequencies. Indeed, a 2011 study shows the consumption of energy and the production of toxic gas related to the collection and the move of wastes from the city streets to the treatment plants by trucks and other engine machines. It reveals an other point in which the actual Barcelona waste treatment system is not efficiently implemented.
kg/month
33% 29.5%
3,500 3,000
20.7%
2,500 2,000 1,500 10%
1,000
6.8%
500 0 PAPER / CARTON 124 964 tonnes 78 Kg/Capita
GLASS 41 051 tonnes 26 Kg/Capita
PLASTIC / METAL 60 369 tonnes 38 Kg/Capita
ORGANIC 199 218 tonnes 124 Kg/Capita
OTHER 178 089 tonnes 111 Kg/Capita
TOTAL OF BARCELONA WASTES PRODUCTION : 804 921 tonnes/2011. WITH 75% BY HOUSEHOLDS OR 603 690 tonnes/2011. CONSIDERING 1 604 555 HABITANTS 502 Kg/Capita/2011.
PARTICULES
CO
CH 4
NOx
SOx
EXAMPLE OF MONTHLY EMISSIONS FROM THE CONSUMPTION OF FUEL BY WASTE COLLECTION VEHICLES / 2011.
100 PEOPLE
PAPER / CARTON 7.8 tonnes/Year 21.4 Kg/Day
GLASS 2.6 tonnes/Year 7.12 Kg/Day
PLASTIC / METAL 3.8 tonnes/Year 10.4 Kg/Day
ORGANIC 12.4 tonnes/Year 34 Kg/Day ... OTHER 11.1 tonnes/Year 30.4 Kg/Capita
More generally, a well management of wastes is necessarely based on a good understanding of wastes themselves in their complexity, of treatments available or in development, and of the benefits we can achieve by developing efficient recycling processes. In this sens a catalogue of the daily life wastes has to be established.
Plastic Waste : Furnitures, decoration items, electronic devices parts, plastic bags, bottles, food packaging, clothes, accessories, table items, cooking items, working items, leisure objects... Metal Waste : Furnitures, decoration items, electronic devices parts, food packaging, alimentation films, cans, accessories, table items, cooking items, working items, leisure objects...
Glass / Ceramic Waste : screen, glass, window, miror, furnitures...
Textile Waste : Old clothes, bed linen, bath linen, table linen, curtain, and other home textile...
Rubber : Joins, non-slip elements, tyre...
Wood Waste : Furnitures, kitchen equipments, decoration items, floors, doors, windows, walls...
Paper / Carton : Packaging, books, newspaper, posters, paper roll...
Electronic Waste : Computer, phone, microwave, refrigerator, printer, lamp, vaccum cleaner, washing machine, heater, oven, cooking hob, internet boxes, speakers...
Organic Waste : Food wastes, human or animal droppings, agricultural wastes...
Building Waste : Stone, plaster, concrete, tiles, wood, steel, glass... toxic smokes during a potential melting process.
Chemical Waste : Batteries, Bulbs, refrigerant fluids...
For most of the recycable materials, the process is often the same. It consists in : - Firstly : sorting the materials. Indeed, materials don’t have the same behavior under further recycling treatments such as shredding, melting or dissolution. Even though they belong to the same familly of materials, their own specific features which are necessary to take in account for making the recycling process as much efficient as it can be. For exemple, melting temperatures are different for the plenty types of plastic which exists as we can see in the melting plastic board provided by “precious plastic” initiative. For a specific plastic material, if the melting temperature is too low, the material doesn’t melt properly and it will produce a bad state final object, if the temperature is too high, it might burn thus produce toxic smokes. In this way, recycling requires a good sorting of each materials and needs to split each type of matterial from an other. - Secondly : reducing the size of the material pieces by shredding them into small flakes. This step makes easier the further treatment processes by turning elements with various size, thickness, aspect... into reduced pieces presenting approximatly the same aspect. Thus, we can expect a more homogeneous result after the successive treatments all along the recycling process. - Thirdly : washing the small divided pieces of materials in order to keep only the wanted material for next recycling steps. For instance, for the food packaging case it allows to eliminate some leftover food which could produce
- Fourth : shredding the small material pieces into smaller elements or grinding them into a powder according to the further needs and the requirements of the implementation method chosen. -Fith : in some cases the material remains at the state of a small flake or a powder in order to be tranformed in something else during an implementation process. For example, the injection process only requires plastic granulates which will be be melted and casted inside a mold in order to produce a new usable object. Some other cases will need an extra transformation before being implemented. For instance, the most common used 3D printer is the filament extrusion systhem. But for making those devices able to use plastic in order to creat objects, the plastic has to be preliminarly turned into plastic filament with a regular diametre. Then, after those deconstruction steps, the material has achieved a pure and basic state. It can be implemented in many different ways according to the final need : - Melted and casted by injection or compression in a pre-defined mold. - Melted and recovered into basic elements such as filaments, wires, coil, rods, bar, plate, slab then be manufactured by hand, lazer cutting, CNC machine, 3D printers. - Used in a thread state to be woven by hand, by a weaving machine or by a textile 3D printer. - Used as a powder in a 3D printer by using a binding process such as jetting, sintering or photocurating technics. - Used as a resine in reaction with chemicals or physical phenomenum (light, oxygen, electrodes...). Amoung others...
So, the entire recycling process is not limited, as most of the people believe, to the gathering and the deconstrcution of the waste. The entire process requires at least : - Collection : This first step can be even avoided if the recycling process occurs inside the same building unit where the object was used. - Sorting : More this step is carried out in a close moment with the time when the object has reached the end of its life more this step can be efficient. It is a matter of users thus it is a mtter of cityzens. - Deconstruction : Achieve a pure and basic state of the material in order to be reimplemented within a manufacturing process. - Manufacturing : It can be achieve in the first manufacturing level or after several evolution of state of the material. The previous mentioned recycling steps are actually processed thanks to a centralized mass system. The collection occurs at the city scale and all the wastes are led towards big plants of different kind. Thus, only those industries take advantage of this process by selling the production made out of cityzen wastes. Which can be energy (electricity, biogaz, biofuel...), compost, recovered material...
However, some initiatives try to show that alternatives are available and easy to access in the recycling field. Precious plastic for instance proposes an affordable way for everybody to be able to deal with their own plastic wastes. Comparable initiatives can be found for other material, like Grant Tompson who proposes a youtube channel providing inovative ideas such as the way to make your own electrical arc furnace for melting metal by using a traditional battery and a fire brick. Those concepts are based on the popularization of complex and badly known methods, traditionaly used in the industry field. The aim is to make those complex recycling processes understandable, affordable and with a small size in order to fit the needed devices in everybody’s home place. The popularization passes through easy understandable technic of comunication (video, blog, workshop...) and the creation of a community in order to share creative ideas. The goal is to involve people in making things by themselves and to make the system able to improve by itself thanks to the community input. Moreover, even though people are able to recover their own waste into new materials, ready to be reuse for other purposes, most of the people doesn’t have the capability or the time to deal with the materials in order to produce new usable products. In the same channel Grant Tompson shows a way to cast an object by using styrofoam and a bucket of sand. This process is rather basic and make almost everybody able to produce very simple metal casted objects.
But it takes time, it requires space and specific conditions to be processed that everybody can not profit, mostly in very dense cities, where the need of local or small scale production is the most significant. Moreover, it remains focused on basic single material objects which reduce a lot futher uses of the material. Thus, this kind of archaic method can mostly match with leisures. 3D print things can be one of the way to produce new usable things made out of raw recovered materials by cityzens themselves. 3D printings actually available are able to print : - Food : Sugar, Chocolate, Paste, sauce, pasta (Barilla)... - Plastic and diverse polymeres : Powder bed + binding method, powder bed + lazer method, resine + UV (+oxygen control) method, filament extrusion... - Metal : Powder bed + binding method, powder bed + lazer method... - Wood : Can be reduced in powder and mixed with a certain kind of plastic in order to obtain 3D printable filament or light reacting powder. Variation of melting temperature during the 3D print allows to get difference of colors within the matterial... - Paper : 3D assembler of plain paper, small size recycler of paper... - Glass : Glass powder + jetting or sintering technics or molted glass extrusion.
- Ceramic : Ceramic bed powder and binding method plus firing steps... - Textile : Electrodes reaction with a pulverized solution of dissolved textile fibres, 3D knitting... - Electronic Devices : The Dragonfly 2020 can print multilayer circuit boards, Voxel8 which allow to mix thermoplastic print with silver ink in order to creat a conductive 3D printed object plus it allows to integrate extra electronic components even during the printing process... - Stone building materials : ETH proposes a method of assembly rock layers maintained thanks to a simple metal wire implemented in a complex way, also clay 3D printer as well as plaster and concrete 3D printers exist already. 3D printers are becoming more accurate and more complex with the aim of being able to deal with the diversity of material features and behaviors. The goal of those researches is to creat more complex objects, including various materials to creat functionning items by using a single printing device requiring a single production stage.
Having that in mind, the proposal is to make an housing building, hosting 100 persons, which would be able to provide for inhabitants the possibility to recover the potential contained within their waste. This project aims to empowerize cityzens by making them real actors in the production of objects of their needs. In order to make a recycling process as much efficient as possible each material has to be well sorted. Indeed, as we already mentioned, materials owns specific physical or chemical features which means that they cannot be treated by the same process. For this reason, the first step requires the action of users in the way that they have to sort precisely their wasted objects and to separate different materials form each other when it is needed. This action could be done mechanically but it would call for much more various sorting machines, so much more energy and much more space to fit those machines in addition to the material recovry machines. It is also a matter of making people aware of what is surrounding them, from what objects they use in their daily life are made of. The project aims also to break the gap between customers, recycling processes and material recovery. Inhabitants of cities should not only be passive customers but should be involved in the production of the items they desire or they need, and also in the management of what they produce as obsolet objects. An other important point is to make people aware of the richness contained in their used objects. Indeed, a good sorting requires knowledges about materials and manufactured objects.
Thus, in order to provide a better understanding of materials and recycling processes, more comunication and informations will be supplyed. Once materials are sorted, they can be sent to the treatment machines, in order to be reduced in basic state materials. Within recycling traditional plants, human intervention is mostly only needed for the sorting step. Since the proposed process involves the customers for this previous step, human intervention is not mandatory for the rest of the operation. Being totally mechanical, those processes don’t have special requirements a part a good aeration, an easy access for maintenance and a thick insulation against noise transmissions. With only one slab in comun with the hall entrance of the projected housing building, the basement seems a suitable place for fitting the material recovery processes. Moreover, the project plans to be located in an urban area, where the needs of density tend to develop a vertical organisation of living units. Thus, we could imagine a collective pipes network contained within the full parts of the building, enabling materials to be transferred dirrectly from the living areas (in the upper parts of the building) to the materials recovering area (in the basement) by gravity action. Lessons of the past showed that using vertical pipes for the transfer of organic wastes wasn’t sanitary available. Moreover, the possibility of implementing a urban farm area on the top of the building argued for disposing an anaerobic bio composting system which is compiling organics wastes of inhabitants in order to produce fertilizer for vegetables and biogas to produce energy supply for the whole building. The tool shelter to look after the urban garden, which is also used to host the composting system, could support a solar panel system in order to make the upper part of the building energy productive.
After being sorted and reduced, materials will be converted into usable mono material elements capable to be implemented by advanced devices like 3D printers belonged by inhabitants themselves. Those basic state material can be filament, powder, resine, rolled sheet, trimmed sheet, thread... The collectivity can dirrectly take advantage of those free access materials as a reward of their contribution. By combining recovered materials and advanced technology devices, inhabitants can produce all the objects they need. They can develop their own design, with their own materials, to get the most suitable objects in order to satisfy their necessity. Then, comunity of makers can share their personal design and on going project to a worldwide benefit.
SMART CITYZEN behavior is to sort thrown objects as soon as they become wastes in order to make efficient in the recycling process
Thrown object Plastic Waste :
Furnitures, decoration items, electronic devices parts, plastic bags, bottles, food packaging, clothes, accessories, table items, cooking items, working items, leisure objects...
Metal Waste :
Furnitures, decoration items, electronic devices parts, food packaging, alimentation films, cans, accessories, table items, cooking items, working items, leisure objects...
Glass / Ceramic Waste :
screen, glass, window, miror, furnitures...
Textile Waste :
Old clothes, bed linen, bath linen, table linen, curtain, and other home textile...
ADVANCED DEVICES (3d printers) can provide efficient way to implement localy the recovered materials
Sorting
Shredding HDPE ABS PETE PVC ...
Magnetic Sorting
Washing
Drying
Basic state materials
Grinding
Powder Filament Resine
STEEL COPPER BRASS PVC ...
Powder
GLASS
Cullet
CERAMIC SYNTHETIC COTTON ...
Granulating
Polymerization
Melting
Powder
Spinning
Thread Blending
Carding
Spinning
Metal
Rubber Waste :
Joins, non-slip elements, tyre...
Filament
Rubber Powder Filament (+plastic)
Wood Waste :
Furnitures, kitchen equipments, decoration items, floors, doors, windows, walls...
Pulping Paper / Carton Waste :
Packaging, books, newspaper, posters, paper roll...
Electronic Waste :
Computer, phone, microwave, refrigerator, printer, lamp, vaccum cleaner, washing machine, heater, oven, cooking hob, internet boxes, speakers...
Organic Waste :
Food wastes, human or animal droppings, agricultural wastes...
Mineral Waste :
Stone, plaster, concrete, tiles...
CARTON WHITE PAPER NEWSPAPER SHELL WIRES STRUCTURE HARD WARES COMPONENTS
Screens
Filtering Centrifuge
De-inking
Powder
Lamination
Rolled Trimmed All along the deconstruction process, usable parts of the device can be kept and re-used for other purposes, For the rest of the parts, they can join other recycling processes according to the materials they are made of
Powder Filament Resine
AEROBIC ANAEROBIC
FERTILIZER FERTILIZER BIOGAS
Agriculture purpose Energy/ Heat
Ren
ewa
Fertilizer supply
labl
e en
ergi
es c
Energy production
apta
tion
Anaerobic Bio composting
Sort individually
3D Print the collective material
Consumption Streams of sorted materials
Streams of recovered materials
Energy supply
Sorting Re-production
Noise
Aeration
Deconstruction processes
Basic materials recovery
Materials recovery processes
Sort individually
Stream of sorted materials
3D Print the collective material
Stream of recovered materials
MATERIAL AND RE-USE Sylvain Totaro Iaac - Mact 2016