Resource recycling and waste-to-energy: The cornerstones of circular economy
Journal Title: Invention Journal of Research Technology in Engineering & Management - Year 2018, Vol 2, Issue 8
Abstract
"Circular Economy" is the pursued goal of sustainable development of mankind for the 21st century. In short, the fundamental spirit of circular economy is the concept of "Zero Waste". The example used in our daily lives means 100% of waste treatment, leaving no trace. At this time, it would be an ideal goal that the waste could be fully recovered into available raw materials or energies. In particular, "waste-to-energy" is a key factor, because all the wastes are almost related to energy. Resource recycling of waste metal from the household garbage is the best example. When smelting metals, the refining industry needs to reduce the metal oxides (mineral materials) to metals, such as steel, aluminium, copper, etc. The reduction processes consume considerable portion of energy for the entire smelting process, for example, 70.6% for steel and 77.4% for aluminium. However, if the waste metallic products can be fully recovered, as long as by melting and reshaping, the original oxide metal reduction processes that consume a lot of energy can be avoided. On the other hand, when the general garbage cannot be recovered as a resource, they can be converted into fuel or electricity by biological or thermal treatment. Another more important human waste utilization is the waste paper recycling. The production of one tonne of raw pulp emits about 6 tonnes of carbon, consuming about 100 cubic meters of water, using about 200 kilograms of chemical raw materials, and draining 300 tonnes of toxic waste water. The entire papermaking process is how terrible environmental pollution! The recycled pulp of one tonne can save energy 10-13GJ.The proportion of paper waste in Taiwan 2015 is 34.69% and the estimated amount is 2.5 million tonnes. If the paper waste could be fully recycled, it could save energy about 0.725 million kloe (kilolitre oil equivalent). In other words, it virtually reduces Taiwan's oil imports of 4.56 million barrels and CO2 emissions of 2.5 million tonnes annually.
Authors and Affiliations
Shyi Min Lu
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP390482
- DOI -
- Views 127
- Downloads 0
Modeling Heat Transfer Coeficient Of Air Using Buckingham PiTheory
Heat transfer coefficients of dryers are useful tools for correlation formulation and performance evaluation of process design of dryers as well as derivation of analytical model for predicting drying rates. A model equa...
The Classification and Harmonization of Accounting Systems. An empirical study of European Union Countries that are not part of the Euro-zone.
Classification is the fundamental key to understand and analyze why and how the national accounting systems are different. It also gives us the opportunity to analyze whether these systems are converging or diverging. Th...
Influence of heat treatment on Vitamin C Levels in Oyster Mushroom
The study was conducted to investigate the influence of heat treatment during drying process of Oyster mushroom in the tropics. Mushroom growing is carried out under carefully controlled conditions mostly in bulk in spec...
Metal Dustbin Fabrication (Project designed to help combat the problem of garbage collection in the Cities and Towns of Sierra Leone)- a case study in Kenema
Government and well meaningful Sierra Leoneans have tried and are still trying to keep the cities and towns clean. In striving to keep the cities and the towns clean, they designed some of the garbage bins (dustbins) by...
Comparison of Various Frequency Distributions (Chindwin Basin), Myanmar
In this paper, computed flood values obtained by frequency analysis for each station in the selected basin are compared with the values by HEC statistical software package whether or not to be reliable. Flood frequency a...