I chose the one connected with recycling.
The whole of talk you can find here http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_biddle.html
Below is my resume about it.
Mike Biddle: We can recycle plastic
Mike Biddle as he said is a garbage man. He believes that many of us continue toddler rules: it’s my stuff if I saw it first! The more stuff that’s mine, the better, and of course it’s your if it’s broken. Mike after spending 20 years in the recycling industry, is pretty sure that people don’t leave toddlers rules behind, but they develop into adults. Every day people discarded about one million pounds of stuff. The United States estimates that there’s about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world every year. And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so far, that number well more than doubles. And of course the more developed the country, the bigger these mountains of trash. For Mike these mountains are not only garbage, but above-ground mine. Why? Because there is a lot of valuable raw materials, which they extract from extremely complicated waste streams. As someone said in TED ‘the world’s getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff. They want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted’. To produce those toys and tools we need mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals. To obtain these materials we go to more and more remote locations, and drill deeper or widen mines. These practices have significant economic and environmental implications. In Europe is increasingly beginning to recover materials and recycle end-of-life stuff. Europe has responsible manner in recycling policies. Most of what is extracted from end-of-life stuff, if it makes to a recycler, is the metals. Probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose. Situation with plastics is different: less than 10 percent are recovered and most of it is incinerated or landfilled. That is why because most people think that plastics have very little value. But actually plastics are several times more valuable than steel. Why this is so? Metals are very easy for humans or machines to separate one from another. Plastic because of its properties is difficult to segregate, so the traditional ways of separating materials just simply don’t work for plastics. In the United States where recycling policies is low-cost, people pick through our staff for about dollar a day. They extract what they need – the metals, and leave behind plastics, because they can’t recover it. Or they burn the plastics to get to the metals. This may be low-economic-cost solution, but certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution. In Mike opinion “it’s not fair, it’s not safe and it’s not sustainable. Mike describes situations observed during journey to Asia. This is just one example. (…) standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in Mumbai, India. They store the plastics on the roofs. They bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these, and people try very hard to separate the plastics, by color, by shape, be feel, by any technique they can. And sometimes they’ll resort to what’s known as the ‘burn and sniff technique where they’ll burn the plastic and smell the fumesto try to determine the type of plastic.
He is telling the story of his life: when and why everything started. About 20 years ago Mike started to figure how to separate very similar materials. More and more his friends got involved in his project. Finally they figured out how to do it, and in the process, they started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics. The traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals. You breakdown the molecules, recombine them in very specific ways. Mike and his friends knew that there should be more sustainable way to make plastics. Sustainable not only for an environmental point, but economic as well. They were using a mining approach to extract the materials. Their plants have lower capital costs, enormous energy savings (about 80-90% than making in traditional way), and can make any type of plastic, not only one like in typical fabrics. They make a drop-in replacement for plastics that’s made from petrochemicals. Because of huge CO2 savings, their customers are really happy.
Mike is describing how their recycling process looks like. First of all metal recyclers shred their stuff into very small bits. Then they recover metals and leave behind shredder residue – a very complex mixture of materials. Later they take out things that aren’t plastics, like metals, carpeting, foam, rubber, wood, glass, paper, even dead animals. The materials are sieved by using magnets or air classification. The first part of the process is more like traditional recycling. At the end of the process there are mixed plastics composite: different types and different grades of plastics. And now is more sophisticated part of process. They grind the plastic down to the size of small fingernail. They use a highly automated process to sort those plastics – by type and grade. At the end of it come little flakes of plastic: one type, one grade. Then they use optical sorting to color sort this materials. They blend it in blending silos. Later the materials are pushed to extruders where they melt it, push it through small die holes, make spaghetti-like plastic strands. At the end they chop strands into pellets. This becomes the currency of the plastics industry. The material is the same that you can get from oil. This whole process turns our old stuff into our new stuff.
Mike wants to show that our old stuff do not have to end on a hillside or go up in smoke, but we can find them in new products, which have been recycled.
His goal in this ‘talk’ is to stop looking at themselves as a consumer and think as just using resources in on form, until it can be transformed to another form, for another use.
He reminds us that Mother Nature wastes very little, reuses practically everything. We should implanter the wisdom of Mother nature in our life’s..
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