Until teleportation becomes a reality there’s going to be a need for energy and vehicles or other means of transport for people to get around and – more importantly – goods and foodstuffs to be delivered to places where people by them. Delivery trucks are an absolute necessity for all of us, and it’s important that people remember the old adage that ‘if you bought it, a truck brought it.’ But commuter vehicles have importance to people on an individual level too, and nearly all of us have a driver’s license and a personal vehicle for our families. Like any consumer product cars will come to the end of their working lives too, and that’s the case for thousands and thousand of them every year across Canada.
We can maybe extend that adage shared above to cover disposal bins, and say if you rent a dumpster in Trenton or Colborne then a truck is going to be bringing it too. Often the same day you call for one, but we’ll save the sales pitch until the end of this blog entry. For now we’ll say that we do everything we can to maintain our trucks and keep them in good working condition for as long as possible. But they’ll eventually come to be finished too in the same way it will apply for every automobile or motorcycle on earth. Long ago the decision makers in Canada and elsewhere realized the need to do better with dealing with junk cars and recycling the parts from them as best as possible.
The effort has always been there, but it’s been a challenge and a lot of cars that end up on the scrap heap end up there with more to them than needs to be the case. That’s starting to change, and recently there’s been interesting new about a process called gasification that has shown a lot of promise for recycling plastics and residues from scrap cars. Our expertise is always going to be with Colborne and Trenton disposal bins and ones for the surrounding areas here in this part of Ontario too, but anytime this type of news comes out it’s sure to garner our attention as we always take an interest in better waste management and recycling.
Call us for a job site cleanup or rubbish removal service around here and we’ll have our roll-off bins on site just as soon as you need them, but for now let’s look at this new technology for automotive part recycling that is going to keep more of them out of the scrap yards and also possibly leaching chemicals into the ground in some cases.
Less ASR, More Recycling
The emergence of gasification for car part residue recycling is the product of research conducted by BASF SE and BEST (Bioenergy and Sustainable Technologies GmbH). What they’ve done is test a process to recycle complex plastics and other residues from scrapped cars, and advanced chemical recycling with gasification is the result from it. The method is showing that it may be very effective for sourcing more recycled materials for manufacturing, which should reduce reliance on fossil-based inputs, as well as contributing to better meeting sustainability targets.
ASR stands for automotive shredder residues, and it’s a mix of waste that is created when cars are dismantled and shredded. It contains plastics, foam, films, and paint and ASR tends to be too complex for standard mechanical recycling methods. For this reason ASR waste is usually either burned or sent to a landfill.
But now with gasification it may be possible that a lot of ASR can be recycled, as it breaks the material down with high heat into basic chemical building blocks called synthesis gas. The wastes can then be returned to the automotive supply chain. Converting complex, mixed waste streams into new, valuable raw materials may now be a sensible alternative to waste incineration.
One of the applications for recycled ASR waste from cars is in the production of steering wheels through a ‘mass balance approach’ where the proportion of recycled content through the supply chain is tracked and allows businesses to accurately report their sustainability gains. Rent a dumpster in Campbellford and we’ll put the steering wheels on our trucks to use, steering our way to your home / property renovation site just as fast as we can get there to get to the site and our roll-off disposal bins are super easy to load and unload and another big benefit with them is that there’s less chance of damage to the grounds of the property when they come down as compared to conventional dumpster bins.
But back to the topic – Mechanical recycling is always going to the primary means by which cars are broken down to prepare for recycling and then disposal of the frame and whatever parts aren’t going to be removed for recycling or repurposing. But complementary approaches like chemical recycling with processes like pyrolysis, depolymerization, and gasification are really helpful in reducing the mass of automotive waste that is produced in North America every year.
This is also conducive to a better circular economy and reducing the plastic waste that still ends up in landfills or is incinerated today. Technologies like gasification open the door to increasing the use of secondary materials in vehicles, and along with meeting regulatory requirements for recycled content this type of progress may also provide a small hedge against volatile raw material prices. In addition, this method also achieves a higher product quality compared to mechanical recycling, making it viable for demanding automotive applications.
Anyone who needs a dumpster rental in Marmora or Havelock can get one quickly and easily by getting in touch with us here at Load n’ Lift. We are best for disposal bin rentals here and we pick up the filled bins in the same timely manner as when we drop them off. On time and right when you need them. All waste material taken from the site is disposed of in the best way as determined by Province of Ontario waste disposal and recycling guidelines. We understand the real need for that from an environmental perspective, and we’re always stringent with it.
