| Within fifteen years Britain and other
nations should be well on with the building of huge industrial complexes for the
recycling of waste. The word rubbish could lose its meaning because everything
that goes into the dumps would be made into something useful. Even the most
dangerous and unpleasant wastes would provide energy if nothing else. The latest project is to take a city of around half a million inhabitants and discover exactly what raw materials go into it and what go out. The aim is to find out how much of these raw materials could be provided if a plant for recycling waste were built just outside the city. This plant would recycle not only metal such as steel, lead and copper, but also paper and rubber as well. Another new project is being set up to discover the best ways of sorting and separating the rubbish. When this project is complete, the rubbish will be processed like this: first, it will pass through sharp metal bars which will tear open the plastic bags in which rubbish is usually packed; then it will pass through a powerful fan to separate the lightest elements from the heavy solids; after that grounders and rollers break up everything that can be broken. Finally the rubbish will pass under magnets, which will remove the bits of iron and steel; the rubber and plastic will then be sorted out in the final stage. The first full scale giant recycling plants are, perhaps, fifteen years away. Indeed, with the growing cost of transporting rubbish to more distant dumps, some big cities will-be forced to build their own recycling plants before long. |