Home Courses Waste Management and Critical Raw Materials Course materials Lectures 2.1.2 Introduction to recycling

2.1.2 Introduction to recycling

Course subject(s) Module 2. Recycling

Welcome back to the second module of our course. This module is about recycling and will look at close and open look recycling, the pre-processing for recycling, metallurgical processes, the trade off between grada and recycling rate, legislation, and environmental issues. It will also show an example of a recycling process and have an interview with a recycler.

In this short video David Peck gives an introduction on recycling.

David Peck researches and teaches in the field of critical materials and circular design. David is the university leader for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation pioneer university programme and is the representative for all the university faculties. He has also been a senior mentor for the Schmidt-MacArthur fellowship programme. He is manager for TU Delft in the KIC EIT Raw Materials, the 7 year+ EU programme on raw materials: sustainable exploration, extraction, processing, recycling, remanufacturing and substitution with a core focus on closing loops.

Main takeaways

  • Recycle more of our existing products in order to become more resource efficient and to reduce our dependence on imports.
  • Recycling operations are either open-loop or closed-loop in nature. Closed-loop recycling means a product can be recycled back into itself; open-loop recycling means that the product will be recycled into other types of products of lower quality material specifications.
  • A recycling system comprises three main stages: Collection, Pre-Processing and End-Processing.
  • Collection is the means by which the items are gathered from the owners/users into the recycling system. Pre-Processing is the stage at which collected products are prepared for the final recycling step. End Processing is where the new materials from the recycling emerge for use as raw materials.

Some extra reading if you want to take this topic further:

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Waste Management and Critical Raw Materials by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/waste-management-and-critical-raw-materials/.
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