Enhancing liberation of end-of-life products for materials recovery

越来越多的监管压力、公众压力和生态效率压力正迫使各行业最大限度地利用可从其产品中回收和循环利用的材料。目前的一个例子是，欧盟指令要求到2015年，95%的废弃汽车必须符合特定的可回收成分标准。由于汽车行业的全球市场，这种监管压力也影响到加拿大生产的汽车。目前，大约75%的汽车被回收利用，但其中大部分是金属。然而，事实证明，将塑料相互分离，并从复杂的消费品（如汽车）中大规模有效地回收塑料是有问题的。迄今为止，只有少数商业企业声称成功地将塑料从其他塑料中分离出来，而且这个过程本身可能会产生重大影响。在车辆回收的情况下，挑战是通过具有成本效益且环境可接受的方式实现额外的20%的可回收性：这20%中的大部分是废弃汽车的塑料，作为碎纸机残留物（SR）处理。这浪费了可重复使用的材料，减少了垃圾填埋场的空间。此外，报废回收过程通常不会对物品进行预处理以提高材料回收的效率，而是依赖于粉碎后的大量后处理来分离所需的材料。

Increasing regulatory, public, and eco-efficiency pressures are forcing industries to maximize the amount of materials that can be recovered and recycled from their products. One current example is the EU directive requiring 95% of all discarded automobiles to meet specific recyclable content criteria through to the year 2015. Such regulatory pressures, due to the global market of the automotive industry, also affect Canadian produced automobiles. Presently, about 75% of an automobile is recycled but the bulk of this are metals. Plastics, however, have proven problematic to isolate from one another and to recover efficiently on a mass scale from complex consumer products such as automobiles. To date, only a few commercial operations claim to successfully separate plastics from other plastics, and there can be significant impacts from the process itself. In the case of vehicle recovery, the challenge is to attain the additional 20% of recyclability through cost-effective, yet environmentally acceptable means: much of this 20% are plastics from discarded cars, disposed of as shredder residue (SR). This wastes re-usable materials and decreases landfill space. Furthermore, end-of-life recovery processes do not usually pretreat items to improve the efficiency of materials recovery and instead depend on extensive post-processing after shredding to isolate desired materials.