̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - recycling

Sowing seeds for sustainability

plc32 — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 11:06:44 +0000

Finding homes for used toasters, recycling batteries and inspiring a fondness for secondhand fashion are just three of the sustainability challenges Cambridge students addressed in the 2024 Easter term edition of the Engage for Change project.

Plastic Fantastic Cambridge

plc32 — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:48:55 +0000

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Association Football Club (CUAFC) will wear a design that copies the match kit from their 1905 Varsity fixture with Oxford for this year's 150th Anniversary Varsity match. But the shirts, socks and shorts for the 39th Women’s Varsity Match and the 139th Men’s Varsity Match in Cambridge on Friday 15th March are a modern marvel of recycling innovation.

Cambridge introduces precision technology approach to recycling in first for UK Higher Education

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 09:23:52 +0000

̽��ֱ��pioneering recycling system – the first of its kind in the UK Higher Education sector - lessens confusion and increases efficiency by offering only two bins for users to choose from. One bin will be for food waste and the other will be for dry mixed waste, labelled ‘resource recovery’. There will no longer be general waste bins.

Waste will be cleanly sorted into recyclables after it is collected, to reduce confusion and unintentional contamination of materials. Food waste will be converted into energy at an anaerobic digestion facility, and the dry mixed waste will be separated into recyclables at a pioneering Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) that can identify and sort recyclables with advanced precision. ̽��ֱ��MRF uses 22 miles of conveyor belts and sorting technology including 2D and 3D scanners, and near infra-red separators.

̽��ֱ��process, which launches in July, aims to increase the ̽��ֱ��’s recycling rates from the current average rate of 54% to an average of 80%.

All of the ̽��ֱ��’s dry mixed waste collections will be made by electric zero carbon tailpipe emission vehicles. In another UK-first, the ̽��ֱ��’s stock of new wheelie bins are made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic collected from the local area. These bins can be recycled a further 10 times.

Steve Matthews, Facilities Management Operations Manager, said: “ ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is committed to exceptional environmental performance. ̽��ֱ��new system will allow us to recycle far more materials than before which will make a positive contribution to protecting the environment.”

Abigail Johnson, Director of Mountain Recycling, the waste recycling company the ̽��ֱ�� is working with, said: “As a team we’re extremely proud to have been selected as a supplier to the ̽��ֱ��. Mountain Recycling’s innovative sorting technology is a win-win, providing an easy way for bin users to recycle, and an improvement in the amount of resources that can be recycled.”

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge aims to increase waste recycling from around 50% to 80% by reducing the number of different bins used by staff and students and introducing an innovative waste recovery service that sorts recyclables with precision technology, including 3D scanners.

̽��ֱ��new system will allow us to recycle far more materials than before which will make a positive contribution to protecting the environment.

Steve Matthews, Facilities Management Operations Manager

Mountain Recycling's materials recovery facility

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Solar-powered system converts plastic and greenhouse gases into sustainable fuels

sc604 — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 16:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, developed the system, which can convert two waste streams into two chemical products at the same time – the first time this has been achieved in a solar-powered reactor.

̽��ֱ��reactor converts carbon dioxide (CO2) and plastics into different products that are useful in a range of industries. In tests, CO2 was converted into syngas, a key building block for sustainable liquid fuels, and plastic bottles were converted into glycolic acid, which is widely used in the cosmetics industry. ̽��ֱ��system can easily be tuned to produce different products by changing the type of catalyst used in the reactor.

Converting plastics and greenhouse gases – two of the biggest threats facing the natural world – into useful and valuable products using solar energy is an important step in the transition to a more sustainable, circular economy. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the journal Nature Synthesis.

“Converting waste into something useful using solar energy is a major goal of our research,” said Professor Erwin Reisner from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, the paper’s senior author. “Plastic pollution is a huge problem worldwide, and often, many of the plastics we throw into recycling bins are incinerated or end up in landfill.”

Reisner also leads the Cambridge Circular Plastics Centre (CirPlas), which aims to eliminate plastic waste by combining blue-sky thinking with practical measures.

Other solar-powered ‘recycling’ technologies hold promise for addressing plastic pollution and for reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but to date, they have not been combined in a single process.

“A solar-driven technology that could help to address plastic pollution and greenhouse gases at the same time could be a game-changer in the development of a circular economy,” said Subhajit Bhattacharjee, the paper’s co-first author.

“We also need something that’s tuneable, so that you can easily make changes depending on the final product you want,” said co-first author Dr Motiar Rahaman.

̽��ֱ��researchers developed an integrated reactor with two separate compartments: one for plastic, and one for greenhouse gases. ̽��ֱ��reactor uses a light absorber based on perovskite – a promising alternative to silicon for next-generation solar cells.

̽��ֱ��team designed different catalysts, which were integrated into the light absorber. By changing the catalyst, the researchers could then change the end product. Tests of the reactor under normal temperature and pressure conditions showed that the reactor could efficiently convert PET plastic bottles and CO2 into different carbon-based fuels such as CO, syngas or formate, in addition to glycolic acid. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge-developed reactor produced these products at a rate that is also much higher than conventional photocatalytic CO2 reduction processes.

“Generally, CO2 conversion requires a lot of energy, but with our system, basically you just shine a light at it, and it starts converting harmful products into something useful and sustainable,” said Rahaman. “Prior to this system, we didn’t have anything that could make high-value products selectively and efficiently.”

“What’s so special about this system is the versatility and tuneability – we’re making fairly simple carbon-based molecules right now, but in future, we could be able to tune the system to make far more complex products, just by changing the catalyst,” said Bhattacharjee.

Reisner recently received new funding from the European Research Council to help the development of their solar-powered reactor. Over the next five years, they hope to further develop the reactor to produce more complex molecules. ̽��ֱ��researchers say that similar techniques could someday be used to develop an entirely solar-powered recycling plant.

“Developing a circular economy, where we make useful things from waste instead of throwing it into landfill, is vital if we’re going to meaningfully address the climate crisis and protect the natural world,” said Reisner. “And powering these solutions using the Sun means that we’re doing it cleanly and sustainably.”

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by the European Union, the European Research Council, the Cambridge Trust, Hermann and Marianne Straniak Stiftung, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Erwin Reisner is a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Subhajit Bhattacharjee, Motiar Rahaman et al. ‘Photoelectrochemical CO2-to-fuel conversion with simultaneous plastic reforming.’ Nature Synthesis (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s44160-022-00196-0

For more information on energy-related research in Cambridge, please visit Energy IRC, which brings together Cambridge’s research knowledge and expertise, in collaboration with global partners, to create solutions for a sustainable and resilient energy landscape for generations to come.

Researchers have developed a system that can transform plastic waste and greenhouse gases into sustainable fuels and other valuable products – using just the energy from the Sun.

A solar-driven technology that could help to address plastic pollution and greenhouse gases at the same time could be a game-changer in the development of a circular economy

Subhajit Bhattacharjee

Reisner Lab

Solar-powered reactor for converting plastic and greenhouse gases into sustainable fuels

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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̽��ֱ��'P' word

lw355 — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 08:00:00 +0000

How do we shift our 'take, make, throw-away' plastic world towards 'recycle, recover, re-use'? It's time for blue-sky thinking plus practical measures in the battle to reduce plastic waste.

'Upcycling' crowned Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year 2019

ta385 — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 15:00:00 +0000

Upcycling was chosen as the ‘Word of the Day’ which resonated most strongly with followers on the Dictionary’s Instagram account, @CambridgeWords. ̽��ֱ��noun – defined as the activity of making new furniture, objects, etc. out of old or used things or waste material – received more likes than any other ‘Word of the Day’ when shared on 4 July 2019.

̽��ֱ��number of times upcycling has been looked up on the Cambridge Dictionary website has risen by 181% since December of 2011, when it was first added to the online dictionary, and searches have doubled in the last year alone.

"We think it's the positive idea behind upcycling that appeals more than the word itself," said Wendalyn Nichols, Publishing Manager of the Cambridge Dictionary. "Stopping the progression of climate change, let alone reversing it, can seem impossible at times. Upcycling is a concrete action a single human being can take to make a difference.

"Lookups of upcycling reflect the momentum around individual actions to combat climate change — the youth activism sparked by Greta Thunberg; the growing trends of vegan, flexitarian and plant-based diets; reading and following the handbook There is No Planet B; or fashion designers upcycling clothes to create their latest collections."

Other words on the shortlist for Word of the Year 2019 reflect the same concern with the effects of climate change, for instance:

carbon sink noun

An area of forest that is large enough to absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide from the earth's atmosphere and therefore to reduce the effect of global warming

compostable adjective

Something that is compostable can be used as compost when it decays

preservation noun

̽��ֱ��act of keeping something the same or of preventing it from being damaged

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Dictionary editors use data from the website, blogs, and social media to identify and prioritise new additions to the Dictionary. They identified upcycling as a word to include after noticing a spike in searches for the word in 2010.

A recent addition is the noun plastic footprint, defined as a measurement of the amount of plastic that someone uses and then discards, considered in terms of the resulting damage caused to the environment. This word, first identified by traditional citation gathering, received 1,048 votes in the New Words blog poll, with 61% of readers opting for the phrase to be added to Cambridge Dictionary.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press has been publishing dictionaries for learners of English since 1995. Cambridge Dictionary began offering these dictionaries completely free of charge online in 1999. Celebrating its 20th birthday this year, Cambridge Dictionary is the top learner dictionary website on the planet, currently serving 394 million unique visitors a year.

Cambridge Dictionary has named 'upcycling', the activity of making new items out of old or used things, as its Word of the Year 2019.

Upcycling is a concrete action a single human being can take to make a difference

Wendalyn Nichols

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press

Upcycling crowned Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year 2019

CUP and the environment

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press is committed to reducing its impact on the environment. Across the world, the Press now sends zero waste to landfill. At its Cambridge office, the Press recently installed one of the UK’s largest flat roof solar installations - predicted to reduce the carbon footprint of the UK business by more than 20%. ̽��ֱ��Press continues to work closely with the wider ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and partners to ensure long-term commitment to environmental sustainability.

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'Extreme sleepover #19' – Living beside Uruguay’s ‘Mother Dump’

jeh98 — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 08:30:55 +0000

Returning to Uruguay’s largest landfill (cantera), ‘Felipe Cardoso’ in Montevideo, to conduct fieldwork for my PhD, I was delighted when local social worker and missionary Jorge told me that I could live at his home, in a housing cooperative overlooking the landfill.

I had worked as a labourer in the construction of the cooperative in 2010 and knew that most of the occupants were relocated residents of an infamous shantytown built on top of an old landfill.

I could use the house as a base for exploring Montevideo’s formal and informal waste trade, since many neighbours were urban recyclers, known locally as clasificadores or classifiers. I’d be able to accompany them as they left in the morning to recover value from the trash at sites nearby, often returning in the afternoon on motorbikes, trucks or horse-drawn carts laden with an impressive array of plastics, metals and cardboard, as well as food, clothing and electronics for domestic consumption or neighbourhood sale.

Waiting to move in and impatient to start fieldwork, I had eagerly accepted when one neighbour offered to host me temporarily in his yard. As it transpired, I lived for a week in the most densely populated accommodation I have ever experienced, sharing a shack with his teenage son and the flapping wings and loose bowels of 22 birds. Now, though, Jorge’s house would be my home for the following year. Initially a concrete block lacking windows and doors, I set about making it habitable, mostly using materials scavenged from the landfill.

Of course I could do nothing about the sights, sounds and smells of the landfill itself. It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist.

Each day, some 60 trucks roll into the compound filled with urban rubbish. At the last count (in 2008, and likely to be an underestimate), around 5,000 waste-picking families make a living from Montevideo’s trash, attempting to recover all that is valuable, usable or edible. Their role in a city where waste management has reached crisis points in the past has been lauded as a lesson to society: they help to reduce the environmental and financial cost of landfill and find value in something that might be surplus to some but not others.

Like my interlocutors who recovered materials from there, I had ambivalent feelings about the cantera which, because of its reliable provision, was nicknamed “the mother”. On the one hand, it was an intriguing site for fieldwork where, under the supervision of Dr Sian Lazar, I focused on processes of labour formalisation, the socio-cultural dynamics of the waste and recycling work, and the history of waste infrastructure and aesthetics. On the other hand, it was also a place of hazard, police violence and a smell that lingered on clothes and skin, getting into hair and under fingernails.

I never slept at the dump but this was previously a common practice: clasificadores would camp there for days or weeks at a time, always at the mercy of the feared mounted police who would set tents alight, showing little tolerance for intruders.

̽��ֱ��closest I came to the apparently boisterous atmosphere of these encampments was joining clasificadores of the Felipe Cardoso recycling cooperative as they spent the last nights in a building the municipality had ceded them for facilities but which some had appropriated as a residence. With the exception of veteran clasificador Coco, who lived there permanently, the space seemed to function as a temporary refuge for male clasificadores who had been kicked out by their wives! On the night of my visit, we sat and played cards, listened to cumbia music, drank into my supplies of Scotch, and discussed the impending closure of the site and the workers’ relocation to a formal sector recycling plant.

With the municipal government’s attempted formalisation of Montevideo’s recycling trade, it is possible that the days of such precarious, autonomous, clasificador spaces are numbered, to be replaced by hygienic and technologically provisioned infrastructures. Yet at the end of my research trip, many of my neighbours were still making their way to the cantera to classify the tons of waste dumped there daily.

Uruguayan priest Padre Cacho once described clasificadores as “ecological prophets” and I can see what he meant – they have long functioned as ‘prospectors’, mining the urban waste stream for valuable materials that consumers have been happy to discard, and municipal governments to landfill or incinerate.

Now back in Cambridge as an intern at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), I am helping to organise a workshop on the ‘circular economy’ to explore the ways that government and industry are increasingly reconceptualising waste as recoverable resource. At a global level, it is important that shifts in policy benefit rather than dispossess informal sector recyclers, the long-time ‘artisanal miners’ of the waste stream.

Just before leaving Montevideo, the annual landfill clasificador Christmas social afforded me an enduring image of slumber amidst the scraps: an old, intoxicated and weary recycler lying on a recovered floral mattress, his sweated brow resting on a large folded rubbish bag, surrounded by thousands of pesos worth of scrap metal.

Patrick’s policy internship at CSaP is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Cambridge Doctoral Training Centre.

In a new podcast, Patrick O’Hare describes his time with the clasificadores – the families who scavenge Montevideo’s pungent ‘wastescape’ to recover and classify anything that is valuable, usable or edible.

It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist

Patrick O'Hare

Patrick working with the clasificadores in Montevideo

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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UK steel can survive if it transforms itself, say researchers

sc604 — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 08:38:33 +0000

̽��ֱ��report, by Professor Julian Allwood, argues that in order to survive, the UK steel industry needs to refocus itself on steel recycling and on producing products for end users. He argues that instead of viewing Tata Steel’s UK exit as a catastrophe, it can instead be viewed as an opportunity.

Allwood’s report, A bright future for UK steel: A strategy for innovation and leadership through up-cycling and integration, uses evidence gathered from over six years of applied research by 15 researchers, funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and industrial partners spanning the global steel supply chain. It is published online today (15 April).

“Tata Steel is pulling out of the UK, for good reason, and there are few if any willing buyers,” said Allwood, from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “Despite the sale of the Scunthorpe plant announced earlier this week, the UK steel industry is in grave jeopardy, and it appears that UK taxpayers must either subsidise a purchase, or accept closure and job losses.

“However, we believe that there is a third option, which would allow a transformation of the UK’s steel industry.”

Instead of producing new steel, one option for the UK steel industry is to refocus itself toward recycling steel rather than producing it from scratch. ̽��ֱ��global market for steel recycling is projected to grow at least three-fold in the next 30 years, but despite the fact that more than 90% of steel is recycled, the processes by which recycling happens are out of date. ̽��ֱ��quality of recycled steel is generally low, due to poor control of its composition.

Because of this, old steel is generally ‘down-cycled’ to the lowest value steel application – reinforcing bar. According to Allwood, the UK’s strengths in materials innovation could be applied to instead ‘up-cycle’ old steel to today’s high-tech compositions.

According to Allwood, today’s global steel industry has more capacity for making steel from iron ore than it will ever need again. On average, products made with steel last 35-40 years, and around 90% of all old steel is collected. It is likely that, despite the current downturn, global demand for steel will continue to grow, but all future growth can be met by recycling our existing stock of steel. “We will never need more capacity for making steel from iron ore than we have today,” said Allwood.

Apart from the issue of recycling, today’s UK steel industry focuses on products such as plates, bars and coils of strip, all of which have low profit margins. “ ̽��ֱ��steel industry fails to capture the value and innovation potential from making final components,” said Allwood. “As a result, more than a quarter of all steel is cut off during fabrication and never enters a product, and most products use at least a third more steel than actually required. ̽��ֱ��makers of liquid steel could instead connect directly to final customer requirements.”

These two opportunities create the scope for a transformation of the steel industry in the UK, says the report. In response to Tata Steel’s decision, UK taxpayers will have to bear costs. If the existing operations are to be sold, taxpayers must subsidise the purchase without the guarantee of a long term national gain. If the plants are closed, the loss of tax income and payment of benefits will cost taxpayers £300m-£800m per year, depending on knock-on job losses.

Allwood’s strategy requires taxpayers to invest in a transformation, for example through the provision of a long term loan. This would allow UK to innovate more than any other large player, with the potential of leadership in a global market that is certain to triple in size.

He singles out the example of the Danish government’s Wind Power Programme, initiated in 1976, which provided a range of subsidies and support for Denmark’s nascent wind industry, allowing it to establish a world-leading position in a growing market. Allwood believes a similar initiative by the UK government could mirror this success and transform the steel industry. “Rapid action now to initiate working groups on the materials technologies, business model innovations, financing and management of the proposed transformation could convert this vision to a plan for action before the decision for plant closure or subsidised sale is finalised,” he said. “This is worth taking a real shot on.”

A new report from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge claims that British steel could be saved, if the industry is willing to transform itself.

We will never need more capacity for making steel from iron ore than we have today.

Julian Allwood

Public domain

Blast furnace #5, Port Talbot Steelworks

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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