José María Alegre - technical adviser ANARPLA - A new era for recycling

The legal regulations for the industrial activity of the plastics processing sector is expanding in recent years and increasingly more complex technical projects for the installation of equipment. The normative technique of electric and job security, the prevention of fires, the regulations of the industrial estates services, the dumping of excess water, are increasingly more stringent controls exercised by public authorities and which are being, more and more, to some degree of specialization by consultants that we manage technical documents for industries.

By also focusing on the sector of the mechanical recycling of plastics, we see how the reclaimers and recyclers, i.e., industry of mechanical recycling, attends a shift in his much stronger administrative and social environment. A few years ago, recycling could qualify as an auxiliary of the transformative and ideal industry to manufacture products such as garbage bags or irrigation pipes. Talked about "to wash" and "clean" materials that, added as adjectives to the cutting or waste, were sufficient to identify them and set a price for the sale or, simply, to reject them and bring them to the dump if they were "bad".

Phase of evolution

Currently, this sector takes relevance as a service, with two distinct stages: the of collection or recovery and the recovery or recycling, both under the general concept of waste management. You are at a stage in evolution, which originates in the time that the European Community acts on packaging and packaging waste to develop the Directive 94/62/EC and it is implemented as law in the different States of the European Union.

Recovering traditional industry and recicladora a network of warehouses that acquire and classified material, more a set of construction companies of machinery and specialized auxiliary workshops is composed of a set of hundreds of other companies. You have to look, with some surprise after 30 years of activity, how a range of institutions and people go to analyze them, to comment on what they have to do and stop doing, regulate and create the impression that was in a situation of "absent" and responsiveness, image that does not correspond to reality. Italy has around 200 companies in recycling, Spain 100, France some 50 and Germany has traditionally sold their waste to Italy. Too bad we were? It is the sector of recycling which perceives the sensation of that external actions are taking place without planning, with scattered reports and proposals for studies and essays on subjects already known within the industry.

The new parameters of the industrial environment, in addition to the existing administrative and industrial regulations and the market are those governing the present system of recogida-capacidad - demand, are caused by the future requirement to treat a greater appreciation of postconsumo materials, especially those coming from the container and packaging. Giving to quite solved the recovery of patchwork and industrial remains, is to improve the recovery of the fraction of plastic postconsumo domestic or municipal solid waste. This has created the expectation that the selective collection of the solid urban waste will allow collecting plastic and more efficiently, avoid their destined for landfill, but that will have to manage their recovery and give an application (create a market) with the recycled mechanicalenergy or chemical.

Process of reflection

Given that these issues have become at European level, is under way to any revision or reflection on them. Legislation and official regulations emerging published makes it necessary to review the terminology and concepts that apply to the words waste, final waste, by-product, cuts, etc. which are accompanied by possible conditions of use, administrative follow-up and justification of their destinations to be able to complete reflect if met the guidelines of waste recycling rates.

The different possibilities of recovery that are opened with the chemist and energy recycling will be necessary to establish a technical specifications for each of the waste materials, either monoproducto or postconsumo mixtures. Well what materials are suitable for mechanical recycling and what must be managed by other processes of recovery of waste, without creating false expectations that everything must should be defined very and can be recycled. You must define is also very well under what conditions some materials should be considered to be waste and which ones are a byproduct or secondary raw material for a process of transformation.

The implementation of legislation for the characterization of the granulates of recycling with introduction of quality assurance systems is also called for. The committees of CEN and Aenor are in full working document generation. Need to address the concepts of bad properties and image of recycled products that certain sectors insist on lavish.

I think, clear that that the industrial producers of virgin materials, transformers, recuperators, recyclers and producers remains and waste plastic materials must reflect together without mutual suspicion. They all have experience and means to contribute. The Central and regional administrations, as well as previously existing institutions, have led to new platforms for dialogue and working groups that are in action. We are entering a new etpaa for recycling.