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Recycling | |||||||||||||||||
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Future Technologies and Processes | |||||||||||||||||
In order for the future of recycling to be successful, the right technologies and processes must be in place. Before we take a look at the future, it is more suitable to identify the problems and improvable areas in recycling today.
Looking at today’s technologies, we realize that almost all of the technologies are not self-efficient. The recycling process for different materials usually has to go through multiple steps and the materials have to be transferred to multiple locations before being completely recycled. The energy cost and economical cost during the transportation of the wastes through different stages make these processes quite expensive and burdensome. As more products are made out of multiple materials, we believe that the technology of the recycling process will lean toward the recycling of compound and composite materials. This is also based on our prediction that many fabber materials in the future will be compounds or composites, rather than being a single material (such as plastic or metal). Recycling of homogeneous materials should also be available, but will be included as a partial-function of the compound/composite material process. Another important issue in recycling today is the usage of human power in various stages of recycling. The future technologies of recycling should steadily reduce, and eventually replace the involvement of workers in the recycling process with intelligent automated machines. The automated machines would be expected to complete the entire recycling process, which include sorting, treating, separing, producing, etc. By using intelligent automated machines, we expect that the entire recycling process time for any material should be reduced significantly since machines can operate at a significantly faster speed than humans and can execute multiple tasks at the same time. Overall, based on the issues mentioned above, what we believe that the future of recycling will have a progression of improvements as new technologies are being discovered and developed. Looking at a closer future (10-50 years), most of the current recycling processes should remain relatively the same, with the difference that many more operations will be automated and computerized, rather than human operated. Also, it is possible that new materials will be rendered recyclable, so new recycling technologies and processes will also be developed and applied to these new recyclable materials. Looking at the far future (+50 years and assuming that most if not all materials are recyclable) recycling processes will be self-efficient (eliminating multiple step processes), single-location (eliminating unnecessary transportation), digitalized, multi-function, multi-material (enabling the recycling of different materials), and completely operated by intelligent automated machines that will allow a quick and cost-efficient recycling process (although humans will still be incharge for supervising and managing). Theoretically, in the future, there will be a recycling process for every material (whether its composite, compound, or single). It is also possible, if technology is advanced enough, that any material could be processed at a single facility through the same process. |
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QUICK LINKS (Specific Table of Contents): Section I: Introduction Section II: Present Section III: Future (YOU ARE CURRENTLY IN THIS SECTION) |
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