Environmental Implications of Recycling and Recycled Products

Consumer awareness, strengthened by legally imposed green constraints, has led to the need for the safe return of products from the field, as well as more environmentally friendly products. As a result, logistics planning must now consider both forward and return flows of products, parts, subassemblies, scrap, and packaging. Reverse logistics is the continuous logistic process through which shipped products move from the consumer back to the producer or recycling enterprises for possible reuse, recycling, remanufacturing, or disposal. The purpose of a reverse logistics process is to regain the value of returned materials or to provide the means for appropriate disposal. The transition from waste management to resource and recycling management, along with increasing price pressure and resource scarcity has required improved quality and efficiency from logistics systems. This applies to businesses from commercial and municipal waste management, as well as industry, trade, and service enterprises with in-house waste disposal tasks. The reverse supply chain includes a series of activities required to retrieve a used product from a customer and either dispose of it or reuse it. The design of efficient transport chains and the optimisation of complex logistics networks, similar to the optimisation of waste collection, waste transport, and waste handling, to give just a few examples, must be applied in the recycling management of all goods. In this chapter a case study of reverse logistics of waste wood and wood products is presented as the coordination and control; physical pickup and delivery of the material, parts, and products from the field to processing and recycling or disposal; and subsequent returns back to the field where appropriate. This includes descriptions of the services related to receiving the returns from the field, and the processes required to diagnose, evaluate, repair, and/or dispose of the returned units, products, parts, subassemblies, and material, either back to the direct/forward supply chain or into secondary markets or full disposal.

All buildings have a specific lifetime which can be divided as construction, operation, and demolition phases. A lot of energy and capital are required in the construction phase of a building inasmuch as a large variety of materials is required for building construction. A high amount of waste material is generated in the construction and demolition (C and D) phases of a building. Due to this fact the dumping of C and D waste materials for landfill is neither economical nor environmentally friendly due to the many environmental impacts associated with it. Thus it becomes quite important to think about the reuse of C and D waste of a building. Recycling and reuse of waste material reduces the requirement of fresh and virgin materials in construction of new buildings. Along with the requirement of fresh material, it increases energy requirements as well as externalities. As we know, many GHG emissions are associated with procurement, manufacturing, transportation of building material, and on-site construction activities which can be reduced by reuse of waste materials in new building construction. This chapter reviews the recycling potential of different types of building materials as well as the energy, economic, and environmental impacts on construction of buildings.

Construction activity generates a large amount of waste, causing environmental and economic impacts due to waste elimination without recycling or reusing these materials. In this research, the incorporation of wastes from different sectors (biomass, power plants, construction and demolition process) in concrete with good fire resistance is studied. The chemical composition and grading curve of these wastes are determined. Fire resistance blocks are manufactured with a high percentage of waste in their composition. The new materials are then subjected to several tests in order to analyse their fire resistance, mechanical properties, thermal conductivity, leaching, and radioactivity. A new façade solution is developed by changing traditional materials for some of the new recycled materials, and their technical features are compared. All four wastes studied decreased the density and mechanical strength of a 28-day-old block, and a higher water ratio is needed for block preparation. On the other hand, the blocks’ fire resistance increased, decreasing their thermal conductivity. The properties of the new materials validate their possible usage for nonstructural applications such as blocks or prefabricated concrete panels for façades and inside partitioning, showing good mechanical and thermal performance. Their use does not represent a significant risk to the environment.

Recycling the crop residues of the two major crops (rice and sugarcane) in the Philippines remains to be achieved. Rice straw burning is still prevalent at 76 % of all rice farms. About 32 % of the 22 million tonnes (valued at PhP 18.41 billion compost) rice straws produced in the 4.4 Mha harvested areas are burned. It will take about 30 years or more to stop rice straw burning in the Philippines at the rate farmers are withdrawing from the burning habit. For sugarcane, 64 % of the trash, at about 3.02 billion kg of sugarcane trash, is still burned. The average annual fertiliser import for the last 10 years was 2.0 million tonnes (50 % of which was nitrogen) valued at PhP 40 billion. Recycling the residues of the two crops (rice and sugarcane) will have a large effect because 50 % of all fertilisers are used for these crops. The total compost fertiliser value of the crop residues of the two crops amounts to about PhP 25 billion (US$569 million) per year. National laws and local ordinances were enacted but monitoring and enforcement should be strengthened. Discussed in this chapter are other paths that must be explored. Farmers could be given incentives and rewards for not burning crop residues instead of the punitive approaches (legal) to enhance crop residue recycling in Philippine landscape.

Sustainable development by its nature appears elusive. It seems the more we try to capture and pin it down the more it moves away from us, leading us into murkier waters and all manner of contradictions. No more is this felt than in the fashion industry where we are presented with a number of oppositions. The fashion cycle renders styles obsolete before they have worn out, generating waste and overconsumptive practices. But it can also bring into the fore practices that have resonance to sustainable development in terms of their location, orientation, and consideration for the environment. As studies emerge considering the detrimental environmental impacts of the manufacture and consumption of new clothes, second-hand clothes have become a focus for research endeavours considering how they can be reincorporated into the fashion system and have resonance to an ever ‘fashion- hungry’ consumer. This chapter discusses methods for the processing of second-hand clothes into fashionable items and, by drawing on the wealth of ‘waste’ materials through reselling, restyling, and remanufacturing, argues that ways of reappropriating them into a more environmentally focused fashion industry is possible and necessary. It sets out as its hypothesis that the global fashion system has value in its transformative powers but that damaging and exploitative forces are still preventing it from being a force for good. This is due to the nature of the items being produced, the way they are manufactured, and how they are ultimately consumed and disposed of.

Textile wet processing involves tremendous use of different classes of structurally diverse dyes such as acidic, basic, disperse, azo, diazo, anthraquinone, and metal complex dyes for many applications from simple colouration to multifunctional finishing of a wide variety of textile materials. Unfortunately, the presence of dyes in effluents generated in wet processing has been continuously polluting waters due to the formation of toxic chemical sludge or carcinogenic compounds. This chapter covers the advancements taking place in the treatment of dye effluents involving the use of chitosan and its derivatives extracted from crustaceans and some fungi. Their advantages are mainly excellent sorption capability, low toxicity, high availability, better biodegradability, and compatibility with the environment. By combining the valuable information about chitosan and its derivatives as well their application in treating wastewaters, this chapter is of high potential value to researchers engaged in the development of products and processes for recycling of dyes from wastewater effluents.

Polyester, a synthetic fibre made from petroleum, a nonrenewable resource, is widely known for its environmental impacts during its extraction and manufacturing processes. Various environmental problems surrounded with the production of virgin polyester production, namely depletion of nonrenewable resource (petroleum, as a raw material for polyester production), and requirement of large amounts of energy during the production process combined with the environmental issues caused by the disposal of polyester at the end of life, makes the recycling of polyester an important and inevitable option. Recycled polyester produced by post-consumer waste such as PET bottles are found to be very environmentally beneficial compared to virgin polyester. Many studies have revealed the same. Applications of recycled polyester fibres in the production of apparel are becoming familiar these days. This chapter is dedicated to deal with the aspects pertaining to recycled polyester textiles and it includes discussions on various recycling technologies for polyester, the process of recycling polyester (mechanical and chemical recycling), and the latest developments in the characterisation of recycled yarns and fabrics produced from recycled polyester-blended yarns. This chapter also highlights the roadmap ahead for polyester in terms of sustainability.

Waste is a substance that is considered by all as unwanted or additional material arising out of any industrial or agricultural operation process, product, by-product, or any other item at the end of their requisite service life. In a country such as the United Kingdom, about 4–5 % of municipal solid waste is composed of clothes/textiles, 25 % of which is recycled. A large amount of unutilised/processed material is generated in the agricultural, food processing, paper–pulp, and textile industries as waste or residue, such as lignin, sericin, dyes, sizing paste, leather fibre, banana pseudostem sap, cellulosic and ligno-cellulosic short to long biofibres, corncob, tomato seed and peel, and many others. The disposal of such waste or residue creates serious environmental pollution, either during their natural degradation, through the microbial pathway, or through incineration. As many of the agro, food, textile, and paper–pulp processing wastes or residues have high technical potential to be used for many diversified end-applications, they have been seriously considered through R&D efforts and application for the production of nanocellulose, microcrystalline cellulose, bacterial cellulose, recovery of dyes, water purification, biodegradable hard and flexible composites, substrates for tissue engineering, recycled textiles, UV protective and antimicrobial agents, binder and biodegradable pots for transplanting of plants, and so on. Life-cycle assessment has also been explored to analyse the environmental performances of different shopping bags.

In the whole world today there has been a growing awareness of the damage caused to the environment by the haphazard use of chemicals, some of which are very poisonous and carcinogenic. The textile industry has been strongly criticised as being one of the world’s worst lawbreakers in terms of pollution because it demands a large amount of water and chemicals. Although air, water, and noise pollution are created at every step of fabric treatment, the most problem-filled is fabric wet processing, in terms of the huge amount of water and goodly number of chemicals used in wet processing and on completion of the process, leftover dyes and chemicals together with water are discharged as effluents. As the amount of sludge created by wastewater treatment increases, effective reuse and safe disposal of sludge becomes most important. This chapter provides comprehensive information about the various methods and techniques in recycling textile effluents and sludge treatment process of textile effluents.

Various reports and scientific literature relating to sustainable development suggest that producers and consumers are adopting alternative performance evaluation indicators for monitoring business activities in addition to traditional economic performance indicators. In this chapter one such new index, the ecological footprint (EF) has been used for assessing the sustainability of an industrial unit manufacturing paper from wastepaper in India. EF has been chosen as it is a transparent approach that provides comprehensive footprint information. This was deemed to be a more appropriate approach as it can be used by the company as a communication tool thereby helping to identify the environmental benefits of implementing improvement scenarios. Recycling paper is a very efficient way to reduce environmental impacts. Putting wastepaper to its best possible use can lower emissions and thereby lower the level of consumption of natural resources. Using recycled paper has been considered to be an attribute for making the environment more sustainable both in the paper and other industries. Recycling paper is an integral part of any solid waste management plan. In this work EF of paper produced by a paper production unit in Balasore, Orissa, India, manufacturing ‘newsprint’ and ‘printing & writing paper’ has been calculated for the year 2011–2012. The manufacturing unit of the case study manufactures 1,25,414 MT tonnes of paper per annum, primarily from wastepaper. Results reveal that the total ecological footprint of the case study unit in 2011–2012 ranged between 60,852–62,751 ha and the ecological footprint per tonne of production varies between 0.48–0.50 ha for the year 2011–2012. This low EF per ton of production is because the unit is using recycled paper for production of its final output. The hotspots or factors affecting the size of the unit’s footprint are namely: energy (generation of electricity in captive plant through coal fired steam turbine), materials (i.e., wastepaper, pulp, and chemicals required for the manufacturing of papers produced), and wastes such as fly ash, paper, plastic, sludge, and the like generated in the process of production. An effort has been made to assess scopes for interventions to help reduce the EF for the production unit under study. Alternative scenarios are identified and based on interaction with the unit the barriers were identified towards implementation of solutions for reducing EF under alternative scenarios.