Three million tons of these goods go to the landfill each year due to their difficult recovery
There is waste that is practically impossible to recycle, because it is made up of many different elements. It is the case of footwear or toys that, together with clothing, go to landfill, creating a huge environmental problem. Now, in Elda (Alicante) the first plant that will recover these objects has been started up.
Specifically, three million tons of clothing, footwear and toys are sent to landfills in Spain, a figure with which it intends to finish a pilot plant for recycling these materials, until now impossible to reuse. The plant, located in Elda (Alicante) and which acts as a “demonstrator that the circular economy is possible and feasible”, is the result of the Circular Industry project, coordinated by the Footwear Technological Center (Inescop), together with the Toy Technological Institute (AIJU) and the Textile Technological Institute (Aitex), which are part of the Network of Institutes Technological Institutes of the Valencian Community (Redit).
“It is estimated that, per year, in the Valencian Community, only 5% of footwear, textile and toy waste is recycled”, details Inescop’s principal investigator in the project, Borja Mateu, in statements to Efe.
The expert points out that the difficulty for its recycling lies in the fact that “both clothes and shoes or toys are multi-composition, that is, they are made of different materials whose separation to be treated separately until now was impossible & rdquor ;.
“Disassembling a shoe is something that can be done manually, with a cutter, if you spend an hour separating the insole, the lining, the leather…”, he admits, but points out that “for this process to be economically viable, the The challenge is to automate it through technology & rdquor ;.
Now, Circular Industry has made this type of recycling possible with which, Mateu considers, “nobody had started working yet due to lack of need or lack of in-depth knowledge of the industry”.
Rippers, mills and decimeter tables
The Circular Industry pilot plant has incorporated machines that are used in the recycling of different sectors such as mining, glass recycling, plastics, which have been adapted to collect other types of materials or sizes.
In this way, the journey of, for example, a shoe that is going to be recycled at the Inescop plant, begins with a “giant ripper”, a shredding machine whose function is “leave all the objects that are introduced in piles of a similar size so that, in that process, the different pieces are released & rdquor ;.
The next step is the metal separatorwhich consists of a belt “like the ones in supermarkets, but on a large scale”, along which the metallic materials are attracted by magnets that separate them from the rest of the waste.
Without the metallic pieces, the residue goes to a mill, which, according to Mateu, is “like a blender with many blades” that crushes objects to a very small size that allows to differentiate the materials, now reduced to particles.
The last step of the process is the placement of all the particles on a decimetric table, a surface to which air and vibration are applied to measure the densities of these elements and to be able to definitively separate them.
From waste to raw material
“What for some is a waste is a material for others”, highlights Mateu, who reviews some of the applications that footwear, clothing and toy waste can have.
In some fields, it points, it is common to reintroduce the material in the sector, as in the case of plastics from shoes, which are used to make new solesbut that same material can be used to produce playground floors, car parts, or even running tracks.
Similarly, heThe plastics of toys can give life to new games, since “being made of the same material and coming from the same objects, they meet all chemical standards”. This plastic can also be used as filament to feed 3D printers.
As for its possible applications in other fields, he points out the automobile sector, which is normally able to recycle “70% of each car, which corresponds to the metalbut not the 20% corresponding to multi-composition materials such as leather, foam, upholstery, bumpers…”
“It is time to raise awareness or educate companies that the traditional way of doing things in terms of waste is over,” says Mateu, although he stresses that the main problem is not the involvement of corporations in reducing waste. but, in fields such as textiles, footwear or toys “those who want to recycle cannot do it & rdquor ;.
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