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What are pre-consumer wastes?
For example, waste trimmings produced by cutting or stamping machines
What are post-consumer wastes?
Discard consumer products
Advantages of Recycling:
- Conservation of mineral resources
- Reduced energy use from mineral extraction
- Reduced mineral extraction and processing impacts
- Reduced waste disposal impacts
Difficulties with recycling schemes:
• Identification of materials.
• Separation of mixed materials.
• Reduction in quality.
• Increased transport costs/impacts.
• Collection difficulties.
• Lack of consumer cooperation.
Why is identification a problem?
- Labour intensive and slow to identify the composition of recycled materials where the composition is important for reuse
Why is separation of mixed materials a problem?
- Alloys of mixed metals cannot be easily separated
- Therefore, recycled aluminium alloys cannot be used where pure aluminium is needed
Why is increased transport costs/impacts in quality a problem?
- Extraction of aluminium ore involves bulk resources where bulk transport can be used creating major economies of scale and lower unit cost
- Recycling may involve the collection and transport of smaller quantities of materials which is more expensive
- Bulk transport is not possible
Do note that recycled materials are actually light than raw materials
Why is the lack of consumer cooperation a problem?
- Successful post-consumer recycling schemes require public cooperation to separate waste
- If the public do not, then it is labour intensive to sort the rubbish
However, why is recycling good in urban areas?
Where consumers separate recyclable wastes and large urban quantities of recyclable waste aluminium is produced, the advantages of conserving resources and energy far outweigh the disadvantages.