Or: Fortune Awaits the Person Who Can Figure This One Thing Out!
Like everyone else, my household produces both recyclable and non-recyclable waste.
More than most people, I’m highly concerned about recycling and repurposing materials and am determined to make a difference.
This concern led me to form IntoCeramics, with Bryan Geary, to help mineral producers and processing industries find value in surplus materials by turning them into ceramics.
As a Michigan resident, I enthusiastically do my best to properly recycle materials according to our township guidelines.
As guidelines go, they are pretty standard:
For me, recycling plastic bottles is not a problem because of a 10-cent deposit paid on all plastic drink bottles (not water, unfortunately) and cans. These I take back to the store for a refund.
For the other recyclable waste I generate, I just try to follow the rules.
I make sure to remove personal info from the junk mail. Recyclers may not be identity thieves, but why take the chance?
I pay particular attention to cardboard because it is eminently recyclable if it has not been drowned in pizza sauce and mozzarella cheese! (I should probably talk to my neighbor about his Domino’s boxes)
How to Make a Small (Really Small) Fortune
At IntoCeramics, we pay close attention to news about recycling because people are incredibly innovative, and we never know when an article on non-mineral recycling might be applicable to a material or process in our arena of mineral repurposing.
Many of the articles we read are thought provoking, even if they don’t make a light bulb go on over our head.
But none of them had made us laugh out loud – until now.
Guess what perfectly safe, non-greenhouse gas generating, non-leaching item cannot be recycled?
Wait for it…
Bowling balls!
In her excellent and hilarious account appearing in One Great Story, Eleanor Cummins describes how Sims Municipal Recycling in Sunset Park, N.Y. receives almost 1,200 bowling balls a year in its deliveries.
Sims recycling is the country’s largest recycling facility of its kind, sorting over 1,000 tons of New York City’s glass, metal, plastic, and paper each day on over 2 miles of conveyor belts.
Apparently, people put bowling balls into a recycling tub for pick up along with their metal cans, cardboard, and plastic.
Why not? Bowling balls are plastic just like soda bottles, right?
Only partly.
Most bowling balls found at your neighborhood alley comprise an inner core covered in durable polyethylene.
Serious bowlers use a “reactive” ball, which feature a custom weighted core covered with a softer, oil absorbing polyester plastic.
Sadly, this leads to discarded bowling balls joining the 20% of Sims’ intake that ends up in a landfill because it cannot be recycled.
It is simply too expensive to break down the balls into their individual components for re-use.
An additional complication is that the plastics used are thermoset and cannot be remelted – just like a fried egg cannot be remelted after cooling (yes, eggs are thermosetting materials).
Conversely, drinking water and soda bottles are not made from thermoset plastics and can be melted and remelted multiple times – like butter, which you can melt, cool, solidify, and re-melt again.
So, there is your path to a very small fortune: find an economical way to recycle bowling balls.
Apparently, we’re not the first to recognize this opportunity. A recent AP news story explains how a Michigan man discovered a 1950s scheme to repurpose scrapped bowling balls as an alternative to gravel and sand in construction projects!
I had never given a thought to the life cycle of a bowling ball. Now, I’m wondering what will become of my college days bowling ball that resides somewhere in my basement.
I suspect it has weathered better than I have these past 40 years!
But Seriously, Folks
Ms. Cummins’ article has an important point to make about recycling and the difficulties that consumers, producers, and recyclers face.
One proposal being considered is Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), which would compel a manufacturer to incorporate environmental costs into the cost of its products.
This idea has taken hold in short life cycle items like water bottles and food packaging and is being considered in certain quarters for longer life items – like bowling balls!
The mining industry has already faced this issue, with responsible mine owners planning environmentally friendly solutions for their tailings and process waste.
A worthy example is MP Materials operation at the Mountain Pass rare earth mine.
95% of the process water used in their milling and separating operations is recycled. The tailings storage facility is 100% dry (no tailings pond dams to collapse), and the chemicals used in extracting the rare earths are regenerated for re-use within the process.
When IntoCeramics’ personnel visited the mine, our first thought was “this is one big mine!”, followed closely by “they know how to do it right”.
Doing it right and planning in advance how to repurpose mineral waste for new uses and products is something that more and more manufacturers are exploring.
And, as recycling becomes ever more important, we think the consumer products industries might just learn a thing or two from the mining industry.
Photo Credit: Photo by Persnickety Prints on Unsplash
