Recycling -Wikipedia

Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. The recovery of energy from waste materials is often included in this concept. The recyclability of a material depends on its ability to reacquire the properties it had in its original state.[1] It is an alternative to "conventional" waste disposal that can save material and help lower greenhouse gas emissions. It can also prevent the waste of potentially useful materials and reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, reducing energy use, air pollution (from incineration) and water pollution (from landfilling). ***** For archiving purpose only *****

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN WASTE MANAGEMENT: A REFERENCE TO ADDRESS A FUTURE CHALLENGE

This article analyzes the set of existing patents in the field of Waste Management. The extraction of the data and its exploitation allow the authors to lay the foundations for the development of a well-founded exploratory analysis of the sector's capacity to address the immediate and future challenges it faces, considering that these challenges are binding on today's society as a whole and committing the societies that will succeed us in the future. Our basic aim is to offer a general view regarding the type of assignees, differences regarding the technological fields across regions of the world, and some quality indicators of patents and its antecedent factors. A sector's capacity for technological innovation and development can be partially measured by considering its muscle and interest in protecting its intellectual property. Since this is a sector with a high social impact and a high degree of regulation imposed by public agents, the innovative work in the field should be aligned with the framework defined by those. In spite of these conditions, our empirical study show the extent of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis on the activity of patenting in waste management. Also, we conclude that there are clear differences in patenting which respond to the different needs and circumstances that regions face regarding Waste Management. Keywords: Waste Management, Patents, DOCDB Patent Families, Recycling, Energy from Waste, Composting, Landfilling, Incineration, Europe

A Novel Energy-from-Waste Approach for Electrical Energy Production by Galvano–Fenton Process

A novel approach allowing the production of electrical energy by an advanced oxidation process is proposed to eliminate organic micropollutants (MPs) in wastewaters. This approach is based on associating the Galvano–Fenton process to the generation of electrical power. In the previous studies describing the Galvano–Fenton (GF) process, iron was directly coupled to a metal of more positive potential to ensure degradation of organic pollutants without any possibility of producing electrical energy. In this new approach, the Galvano–Fenton process is constructed as an electrochemical cell with an external circuit allowing recovering electrons exchanged during the process. In this study, Malachite Green (MG) dye was used as a model of organic pollutant. Simultaneous MG degradation and electrical energy production with the GF method were investigated in batch process. The investigation of various design parameters emphasis that utilization of copper as a low-cost cathode material in the galvanic couple, provides the best treatment and electrical production performances. Moreover, these performances are improved by increasing the surface area of the cathode. The present work reveals that the GF process has a potential to provide an electrical power density of about 200 W m−2. These interesting performances indicate that this novel Energy-from-Waste strategy of the GF process could serve as an ecological solution for wastewater treatment.

Environmental Consequences of Poor Landfill Management

Landfill is a popular method of waste disposal in many countries due to its relatively low of costs of operation. The offensive aspect of the method is improper removal or disposal of the waste, which has resulted in avoidable sicknesses, diseases and preventable deaths. Carbon dioxide and methane are the two main gases emitted from landfill sites; municipal solid waste issue accounts for almost 5% of total greenhouse gas emissions and methane from landfills accounts for 12% of the total quantity of global methane emissions. Landfills can be put to sustainable use by employing it to produce energy from waste whenever is feasible and it has the capacity to generate revenue. Furthermore, many advanced waste treatment technologies have been developed which received commendable attention in developed countries and are evolving in developing countries. Landfill gas-to-energy is viable economically and for control of methane emissions and effective management of time, costs and quality with minimum risks to humans and the environment.

Lead-free relaxor-ferroelectric thin films for energy harvesting from low-grade waste-heat

One of the ways to mitigate the world energy crisis is to harvest clean and green energy from waste-heat, which is abundant, ubiquitous, and free. Energy harvesting of this waste-heat is one of the most encouraging methods to capture freely accessible electrical energy. Ferroelectric materials can be used to harvest energy for low power electronic devices, as they exhibit switchable polarization, excellent piezoelectric and pyroelectric properties. The most important characteristic of ferroelectric materials, in the context of energy harvesting, is their ability to generate electric power from a time-dependent temperature change. In this work, we grew highly c-axis oriented heterostructures of BaZr0.2Ti0.8O3 (barium zirconium titanate, BZT)/Ba0.7Ca0.3TiO3 (barium calcium titanate, BCT) on SrRuO3 (strontium ruthenate, SRO) and deposited on SrTiO3 (strontium titanate, STO) single crystalline substrate using pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique. We investigated the structural, electrical, dielectric, and pyroelectric properties of the above-mentioned fabricated heterostructures. The wide range of θ–2θ X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns only shows (00l) reflection peaks of heterostructures and the substrate which confirmed that the films are highly c-axis oriented. We are also capable to convert the low-grade waste-heat into electrical energy by measuring various temperature-dependent ferroelectric hysteresis loops of our nanostructure films via pyroelectric Ericsson cycles and the structures show an energy conversion density ~ 10,970 kJ/m3 per cycle. These devices exhibit a large pyroelectric current density of ~ 25 mA/m2 with 11.8 °C of temperature fluctuation and the corresponding pyroelectric coefficient of 3425 μC/m2K. Our research findings suggest that these lead-free relaxor-ferroelectric heterostructures might be the potential candidates to harvest electrical energy from waste low-grade thermal energy.