When something breaks or is no longer useful, we throw it away. For one person—or even one business—this may not seem like a big problem. But it’s a whole different story when you multiply that by millions. The United States alone produces 230 million tons of waste per year, and processing that much trash is both difficult and expensive.“Landfills take up space, they cost money, and sometimes there's some recovery of methane gas... but in most cases, that doesn't happen. The material just sits in a landfill,” said Paul Woodruff, president of the Sustainable Resources Group, Inc. “One of the major problems in this country, for instance, is that we throw away several hundred million tires a year. And they just pile up, occasionally in huge piles. Sometimes spontaneous combustion takes off and these things burn for years.”
Sustainable Resources Group is an environmental services firm, specializing in facilities optimization, brownfields transformation, and residuals management. In other words, the company finds better ways of coping with waste, aside from the traditional options of bury or burn. In the case of used car and truck tires, several possibilities have arisen. “Some of that rubber is ground up and goes into bituminous paving, and some of it winds up in the support for railroad tracks at crossings,” Woodruff said. “That's the idea. It is to take material that has had its useful life and find a way to use it again.”
Woodruff works closely with manufacturers to find ways to reuse materials that are left over from producing goods. “Unfortunately, you can't wind up with 100 percent of your raw materials in the end product. So the materials that you can't sell usually go to a landfill,” he said. “Right now we are trying to help a client that manufactures automobile and vehicle batteries. They do take batteries back after use and recover the lead, but that leaves a waste acid that's in the battery. So we’re going to try to find a beneficial use for that waste acid.”
Recycling or finding other uses for trash can even create a second revenue stream for manufacturers. In essence, they gain a second product as a byproduct of making the first. “Each manufacturing operation presents unique challenges as to the waste streams that emanate from them. Frankly, some are beyond the reach of finding an economical way to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse,” Woodruff said. “And in other cases, it is possible. So we're in a business of trying to find those cases where it is possible, and making it happen.”
For more information please visit: www.sustainableresourcesgroup.com
We recommend:
Taking the old adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure to an entirely new level. A
First 50 Megawatts of Large Solar Power Plant in Baja California, Mexico Enabled By Cross-Border Col
From Private Utility to Public Conservation California Center for Sustainable Energy, a nonprofit
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
