World Recycling Forum: Un-Scrambling the Egg

Obsolete battery and cell phone collector Carl Smith of Call2Recycle, Atlanta, continues to see a wider mix of materials flow into his company’s collection centers. Ideally, equipment and technology providers will continue to introduce a wave of innovations to sort through these materials.

Smith was joined at a session of the World Recycling Forum, held in Hong Kong in mid-November, by Dr. Rainer Koehnlechner of Germany’s Hamos GmbH, who provided an overview of some of his company’s sorting systems.

As part of his message, Smith estimated that around 14.9 billion batteries are disposed of annually in the United States and Canada.

According to Smith, North America currently does not have the battery smelting or recovery capacity to absorb this many units, especially for alkaline batteries. He also said regarding some types of rechargeable batteries, “It is very difficult to find anyone who wants them” and that collectors often “pay $2.50 to $3 per pound to have them processed in the U.S.”

The steep price of cobalt and nickel is causing some battery manufacturers to move away from these materials, further diminishing the incentive to recycle these lower metal-content units. “The days of a rich, highly-cobalt rechargeable battery are going away,” Smith lamented.

Koehnlechner of Hamos centered his comments on the recycling of mixed plastics created by the shredding of a mixed obsolete electronics stream. He noted that there are some 60 types of polymers used by consumer and office products companies, but that a sorting system can be designed to concentrate on polystyrene (PS, including HIPS), ABS plastic and polypropylene (PP).

Since black is a predominant color used, infrared and other optical sorting techniques face limitations, said Koehnlechner. Because of this, Hamos has focused on “a combination of wet and dry technologies” to separate plastic pieces based on their density. Density technology can also ferret out glass and metal contaminants in the stream.

Because a post-shredded stream also will contain wood and elastomeric rubber contaminants, Hamos systems separate materials based on their electro-static charge acceptance.

The result, said Koehnlechner, can be ABS and PS streams with 98.5 percent purity and “no flame retardants” that can be “sold to both compounder and dealers to go directly into new products.”

The 2011 World Recycling Forum, hosted by ICM AG, was Nov. 15-18 in Hong Kong.