A Study on Establishing a Recycling-oriented Society
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Lu, Li-Teh
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
The increase of population and the rapid consumption of material have caused the global environment to worsen and become unsustainable. The relationship between population and environment can be represented by the master equation: Environment Impact = Population × GDP per capita × Effect on environment per GDP. Effect on environment is directly proportional to the population growth. In the 4.7 billion years of earth history, human has only been existing for less than 3.7 million years. It is also clear that although the environment has worsened as population grew and as human stepped into the agricultural era, the process has only started to worsen rapidly after the industrial revolution.
In the next 50 years, global economy is estimated to grow by five times while the population is expected to grow by 50% of what it is today. It is expected that the consumption of global resources will almost triple. It is unimaginable how fast the world is using up its material. Recycling our resources, and decreasing the consumption rate of such resources, are the very important elements to establish a self-supply and self-sufficient recycling-oriented society. Or non-sustainable human behaviour will lead the earth to its destruction by constantly putting toxic in it. In another words, we must say goodbye to the throw-away society and take the path to the recycling-oriented society in order to achieve a sustainable development.
Three major issues of building a recycling-oriented society are resources production efficiency, product recycling rate, and garbage disposal rate. These issues cover quite a general area. This paper will discuss a recycling-oriented society in the areas of dematerialization and detoxification. With dematerialization, this paper will use an example which looks at the CO2 production rate in the town of Toucheng in the ILan prefecture to examine the effect of agricultural and fishing industries on the environment. Toucheng is a typical agricultural town, with more than 50% of the population work being in the agricultural or fishing industry. The region does not have heavy industries generating air pollution as most of the factories are in the processing industry. Toucheng is one of the few towns in Taiwan that has a good resources recycling in place. This study shows that in 2002, the CO2 output in Toucheng was mainly from electric power (76.7%), motor vehicles (15.9%), and household gas (6.9%). CO2 output from agricultural, fishing and livestock industries was only 0.5%. Clearly, impact on the environment from agricultural industries is comparatively lower. The other main point with dematerialisation is closing the loop on material flows, and the most important job of which is resources recycling. This study describes and evaluates the municipal solid waste management system in Taiwan, and uses life cycle analysis (LCA) and cost benefit analysis on notebook manufacturing. The problem with the municipal solid waste (MSW) in Taiwan is very similar to the rest of the world. Since 1997, the Taiwanese government has increased the responsibilities from manufacturers as well as establishing cleaning services to promote waste minimization. As a result, amount of waste reduced by 30% while MSW output per person dropped to 0.82 kilograms. When compared with USA, OECD, Britain, Japan, Holland, Hong Kong and Singapore, Taiwan’s achievement on waste minimization was outstanding.
With regards to notebook recycling, results from life cycle analysis have shown that recycling brought upon more harm to the environment. Contrary to public beliefs, damage to the environment and human health associated with the resources required for notebook recycling outweighs the benefit of recycling. This is due to the fact that relatively light-weighted control units in motherboards and CPUs are non-recyclable but yet have the most impact on the environment. Hence, effective recycling is not only about how much is being recycled but about improving recycling technology to recycle components of control units, as well as improving processes to reduce energy consumption to minimise impact on the environment, and hence achieve true material recycling. Furthermore, due to globalization and the fact that in the past Taiwan was one of the major manufacturing outsourcing center in the world, more than 50% of the notebooks were assembled in Taiwan. As previously pointed out by the life cycle analysis, control units have the most impact on the environment out of all notebook parts. However, as control units were produced overseas, Taiwanese manufacturers had no insight knowledge on what harmful materials were used to produce the control units. In addition, as notebooks were exported to overseas and recycled overseas, hardly any materials came back to Taiwan. Therefore, achieving environmental friendly design is far more important than the subsequent recycling of the notebooks. This study on notebooks recycling also explains the importance of detoxification.
This study applies structural equation to establish the relationship between MSW/Food Waste recycling and average concentration of Dioxin output from refuse incineration plants to build a detoxification evaluation model of a recycling oriented society. This study shows that detoxification recycling contributes the most in detoxification while the relationship between PVC plastic recycling and decrease in Dioxin output from incineration is not evident due to lack of reinforcing recycling PVC plastic. Material flow analysis on the heavy metal Cadmium shows that refuse incineration policy does not satisfy the two principles of sustainable growth, which are dematerialization and detoxification. The most important policy with MSW incineration should be to reduce the use of Cadmium by restricting the use as well as promoting the recycling of plastics and Nickel-Cadmium batteries.
Regulations imposed by Taiwanese government on recycling and the increase of responsibilities by the manufacturers have achieved great results for dematerialization but still leaving room for improvement in areas of detoxification. To step into a recycling oriented society, more research is needed for environment friendly designs and detoxification are also required in the future. The government should adapt the model that was used to establish the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) 30 years ago and could establish a public trust fund from the recycling fees paid by the manufacturers. It could allocate part of the fund to continue resource recycling and use the majority of the fund in research and development to establish the technology required for setting up a recycling oriented society. This is beneficial to both parties for the manufacturers by helping them to improve their manufacturing processes and on the other hand, the public trust fund can be supervised by the Legislative Yuan of the government but still function as a trust. There should be regular contributions into the trust fund and funds should be allocated to research and development yearly with the aim to build Taiwan into a green silicon island.
Subjects
去物質化
去毒化
物質流
生命週期評估
recycling-oriented society
dematerialization
detoxification
material flow
life cycle assessment
Type
thesis