Recycling: A Beginners Guide

« Back to Home

Top Innovations Transforming the Metal Recycling Industry

Posted on

The metal recycling industry is perhaps the most misunderstood, which can be attributed to the lack of knowledge by players. One area that people often think the metal recycling segment lags is innovation. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The metal recycling industry continues to invest heavily in innovation because it is the only way to maximise gains. This article highlights high-tech advances in metal recycling. Read on.

Cement Strengthening With Tyre Steel Fibres 

Australia discards approximately 56 million tyres annually. The saddest part is that approximately 27 million tyres are not recycled. If you sit back and digest the information, then you realise that motorists are derailing the gains made in recycling old car tyres. The reason is that a sizeable chunk of the tyres end up in landfills or are left on the streets and residential neighbourhoods. Fortunately, innovative recyclers have taken matters into their own hands to reduce the number of unrecycled tyres. For instance, recyclers recover the steel fibres in tyres and sell them to construction companies as concrete reinforcing agents. Thus, it helps construction contractors save costs and the amount of waste metal in landfills.

Extracting Metal From MRI Machines

For a long time, metal components in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine could be dismantled and recycled through traditional techniques. However, recovering metals from the machine posed a significant challenge. The reason is that the metals were encased in a resin, and attempts to extract them using traditional methods damaged them and produced toxic fumes. Today, metal recyclers use pyrolysis to recover copper, niobium, and titanium from the resin. The innovative metal recovery procedure means that all metals in an MRI machine are able to be recovered and recycled safely. The technology is also able to be used to recover other metal alloys in biomedical equipment.

Deliberate Sorting of Scrap Car Parts

Lumping scrap car parts for iron is common in automobile metal recycling. Unfortunately, it makes recovery of other metal alloys challenging, inefficient, and expensive with unrecovered metals ending up in landfills. To address the issue, metal recyclers innovated a sorting process that allows them to increase the recycling rates of alloys in scrap metal. The method deliberately classifies scrap metal parts into eight categories based on what each alloy is able to do. By increasing metal recycling rates, the technique helps car manufacturers significantly reduce the cost of raw materials.


Share