Creating resources from rubbish is nothing new - and most of us have the council recycling bins to prove it - but the energy required to collect and recycle rubbish means that an economic argument for recycling often doesn’t stack up.
Recycling common consumer prod ucts such as paper and plastic also results in a second-grade material with fewer useful properties than its first-life parent. Newspaper, for example, loses fibre strength each time it is recycled, so a piece of ‘virgin’ paper will make it through five or six cycles of recycling before the fibres are too short to hold the pulp together. In the first recycle, the paper might contribute 55 per cent to the content of Australian newsprint. The second, third and fourth times around, the degenerating paper fibres will make boxes at best.
Recycling wrings more worth out of materials but ultimately they become landfill. In 1994, German industrialist Reiner Pilz commented on recycling and coined a new phrase. “Recycling. I call it downcycling. What we need is upcycling where old products are given more value, not less.”
Upcycling: the concept of taking one type of consumer waste and converting it into something more valuable. This concept is central to the ground-break ing Cradle to Cradle, a book written in 2002 by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart, espous ing a closed loop process that mimics nature, where the waste of one process becomes the resource of another. The vital difference between recycling and upcycling is that upcycling eliminates waste and generates value, making it economically attractive to big business.
Australians already ‘get’ recycling, but so they should: at around 2000 kilo grams of waste per person, we are just behind the USA in generating the high est volume of waste per capita.
Although 95 per cent of Australians put out our bottles for recycling, only 55 per cent of our glass, 83 per cent of our aluminium, and 70 per cent of our PET bottles actually get recycled. The statis tics for glass and aluminium should be higher because these materials can be infinitely reused without loss of quality and both materials offer cost and waste savings in recycled form: recycled glass melts at a lower temperature, saving around 20 per cent of the energy required to make ‘virgin’ glass while recycled aluminium uses a whopping 90 per cent less energy than new.
Plastic is another story. Generally, plastic only downcycles, losing signifi cant strength once it is re-melted, so the search is on for a way to upcycle poly ethylene terephthalate or PET, the stuff of soft drink bottles and polyester fibres. To date, PET has been turned into polar fleece and wicking sports fabrics; Nike suggests that their PET World Cup jer seys, each containing eight recycled bottles, have diverted 13 million plastic bottles from landfill.
But truly upcycling PET means giving the plastic a higher value, for instance making a single-use plastic bottle into part of a recyclable plastic beam stronger than steel, a plastic hull more durable than fibreglass, or a plastic tex tile more resilient than Kevlar. These are the claims of srPET (self-reinforcing PET), a Danish product which, although cur rently made from virgin material promis es to create valuable, recycled self-rein forced PET structures that, in addition to being easy to recycle (because they are homogenous rather than composite materials) are lighter and cheaper than the norm. srPET was trialled in the bot tle-hulled Plastiki boat.
For now, Australian renovators can elect to make their bench tops from Paperstone, a 100 per cent recycled post-consumer paper material held together with a non-toxic resin derived from cashew shells — or stick with a man- made resin that looks like stone and emits toxic fumes whenever it gets hot. Build a deck with fire and termite-resist ant reconstituted plastic lumber boards — or remain the world’s third highest per- capita user of arsenic-treated pine.
We will throw spent tyres into con crete for aggregate, wheat husks into natural resins for chipboard and denim into wall cavities for insulation. And while we bide our time waiting for the rest of our building and consumer prod ucts to include upcycling as part of their life story, we can bridge the gap with products that multi-task and do more with less - rainwater tanks that act as formwork for concrete slabs or as ther mal mass for walls, insulating gyprock, and in the future, solar paints that gen erate energy and protect a structure at the same time.
Sally Dominguez practiced sustainable architecture for nine years before receiv ing design acclaim for her Nest highchair and modular Rainwater HOG tank. The Nest is now held in the Powerhouse Museum's permanent collection, and the Rainwater HOG tank was named as one of the USA’s Top 10 Green Building Products in 2008.
Dominguez is currently a judge on ABC's The New Inventors and will be moderat ing a sustainable version of the program during Green Cities 2011 (to be held in Melbourne from 27 February to 2 March). This ‘Extreme Green’ session will examine innovative green building prod ucts and materials that are the stuff of science fiction today but may be the norm in 2020.
See: www.greencities.org.au
