Local solutions to global problems

While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates the waste sector contributes 3 percent of carbon emissions, many experts agree its actual emissions are much greater. 

This is because emissions from landfill get most of the attention, but the emissions from the rest of the waste sector get disaggregated and reported in different areas – energy-from-waste is counted under the power sector, while moving waste around is counted under transport. Added together, the waste footprint equates to about 8 percent of total UK emissions.

David Wilson, visiting professor in resource and waste management at Imperial College London, told the 'COP26 and the Waste and Resource Sector' event organized by the Policy Connect think tank that the IPCC's 3 percent estimate is "just wrong."

The recycling industry creates significant energy emissions, but this is not the full picture because the benefits far outweigh the energy costs by saving carbon emissions in other sectors of the economy. Experts agreed that the impact of the waste sector on climate change is much higher than is being recorded and that this needs to be addressed in all countries. 

"If we are to have any chance of limiting warming to 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius," Wilson warned, "together we need to put better waste and resource management firmly on the agenda at COP26."

Most countries in the global south are experiencing rapid growth in urban population and a rapid increase in the amount of waste they generate. Meanwhile, citizens show a growing environmental awareness. 

In this look at global innovations, CGTN Europe explores some of the initiatives that governments, citizens and businesses are undertaking to encourage a more circular economy.

What do you do with electronics and appliances that no longer work? Do you get them fixed or throw them out and buy new ones?

Repairing old items can be costly, time consuming, or even impossible, while throwing them out can damage the environment.

Some manufacturers make replaceable parts scarce or don't release repair information, says Chloé Mikolajczak, a campaigner for the European Right to Repair movement which is advocating for legislations that would make it easier to repair broken items.

"Manufacturers have put up so many barriers and so many challenges to repair old products," she tells CGTN. "That means for a lot of consumers, they either can't repair it or for a very expensive price (making) buying something new all the more interesting."

However, while buying new might feel exciting, the environmental impact is noticeable. The majority of the damage done to our atmosphere by small electronics occurs during the energy-intense manufacturing phase. It also consumes new resources and raw materials.

Furthermore, according to the United Nations, we generate around 50 million tons of electronic or e-waste every year and less than 20 percent of that is recycled, meaning that old microwave oven is likely to sit in a landfill for decades.

Repair Cafes

This drive to repair old items has manifested in the growth of community "repair cafes" all across Europe. In Germany alone there are more than a thousand of these events, at which capable volunteers offer their time to try and fix their community's broken gadgets.

Anything from old sewing machines, lamps and TVs are given a chance at a second life, says Brigitte Fingerle-Trischler, who is the organizer of a repair cafe in Munich.

"The range is actually quite wide," she says. "Our repairers are very happy to do electrical things, i.e. irons and vacuum cleaners. It is very important to us that this possibility exists at all, that one thinks they should try to repair it before throwing it away."

One of those repairers is Hans Gall, a radio frequency engineer who has been tinkering with things since he was a child and has managed to repair Joseph's old power drill in a matter of minutes –  "A simple fix," he says, "that will give the drill 10 years or more of good service."

Yet many items produced more recently are not so easy to fix, and that's why Mikolajczak says EU-wide legislation is necessary. The European Parliament has voted in favor of right-to-repair rules that should ensure goods are repairable for a decade, but activists are worried the measures don't go far enough.

"There isn't yet a real universal right to repair at the European level that tackles most products. So this is why we are still fighting."

Yet on individual national levels, some progress is being made. For instance, France has introduced a Repairability Index, which forces some manufacturers to display a repairability score between 1 and 10 on their products. And some Austrian states have begun offering consumers a 50 percent subsidy towards the cost of repair. Yet other EU countries are lagging behind, says Katrin Meyer from Germany's round table for repair.

"We saw how quickly France was able to develop such an index and we already see that manufacturers changed their policies by publishing more information than they did before in order to receive more points on this repair score. We would love to see it on an EU level."

The European Commission agrees that regulating manufacturers will have a significant environmental impact, but presenting a legislation that manufacturers will also accept is a challenge, says Mikolajczak.

"The big tech companies are coming in with a lot of money to Brussels to lobby discussion makers," she says. But once designed, that legislation is likely to have broader reach.

"Manufacturers are not going to start making one repairable product for the EU and one non-repairable product for the rest of the world, argues Mikolajczak. "These laws, if they are ambitious enough, will truly have global implications."

If you knew there was gold and silver languishing unwanted at the back of your kitchen drawer, would you ignore it or simply throw it away? 

It sounds strange, but that's the fate of an extraordinary amount of the world's gold and silver. Because these precious metals, whose beauty has been valued for millennia, now also perform functional usage in almost all electronic devices – precisely the type that many of us use, lose, discard or ignore when we upgrade.

It's a curious and potentially lucrative area that is now being examined by many companies. One of the biggest names is the UK's Royal Mint, which is teaming up with Canadian clean tech start-up Excir to harvest electronic waste.

Founded in the year 886, the Royal Mint produces all the UK's coinage, so precious metals have always been its area of expertise. No wonder Sean Millard, who was appointed last year as its Chief Growth Officer, is keen to diversify into helping reclaim all that precious material uselessly caged in the back of dead devices.

"There's gold and silver in pretty much any electronic device," Millard tells CGTN, "from your kid's toy to the most sophisticated nuclear weapons and everything in between – 7 percent of the world's gold is in discarded electronics."

As a species, we discard a lot of electronics: 50 million tonnes annually, or "350 cruise ships," says Millard. "And only 18 percent of that is being recycled currently, which is a major problem and a major opportunity, both for society and for businesses."

It's also a potential opportunity for the public. "There's 20 discarded electronics on average in everyone's home," says Millard, many of which are mobile phones. "You can post those to suppliers and they will pay you for the value of their mobile phone."

Not everybody visualizes volumes in terms of cruise ships, but how much gold is in an iPhone? Millard is frustratingly unable to give an exact answer, precisely because ever-developing technology leads to fluctuations in usage.  

"The iPhone of 15 years, 10 years, five years, three years ago has different levels of gold in it – even different laptops from similar manufacturers have different levels in them," he says. "That's what makes this important, the technology that we've developed – the ability to selectively pull out the gold and only the gold."

How extraction works

Previous extraction techniques had been much less clinical, but Millard describes the new system with an educator's clarity. "If you think of a beaker and a printed circuit board," he explains, "if you dip that into the solution and remove it – literally it's in seconds – that solution would have taken 99 percent of it at 99.99 percent purity."

That purity is also useful further down the waste chain. "What's been happening is that they've been shipped to other countries and smelted, which is essentially burnt, to get to those precious metals and then the byproducts need to be managed – and unfortunately, in many cases, that's been sent to landfill and it's hazardous byproducts. 

"That's the thing which we're really changing – it's happening on-site, at room temperature, with no bleeding of thousands of CO2 miles in either travel or smelting."

Millard and the Mint are currently exploring "some great avenues" for what to do with their own, minimal waste, as they attempt to make precious metal reclamation part of "a completely circular economy" – one he sees as a joint effort between manufacturers, consumers and salvagers.

"If you look at the drive for manufacturers to manage their end-of-life, it's an important drive that consumers are pushing," he says. "Increasingly we'll be getting better opportunities to reclaim the parts of all those phones that are valuable ourselves and be incentivized to really go that extra mile, not just throw it into the bin."

Kinga Tamasi is a materials engineer and a lecturer at Hungary's University of Miskolc who bonded with her student Eszter Borsodi over a love of coffee. Together the pair have bought an idea that first crossed Tamasi's mind a decade ago – saving leftover coffee grounds from landfill and making them into something new. Their test products include lampshades, candle holders and pendants for necklaces.

"If you check your household and the environment you can see a lot of waste, for example from the kitchen," Tamasi tells CGTN. "The waste is basically plant-based or animal-based waste and that was my first tool: How can I recycle this material? And it's cheap and available, and that was the first step for my project."

The pair have been working on the project for more than a year, around their day jobs and study commitments. They take the wet coffee grounds, dry them and sort them. They're then mixed with a plant-based polymer to create a molten mixture that's fed into a 3D printer. Built up over a number of days, the printer creates a piece layer by layer that is made up of 10 percent coffee grounds.

Borsodi says coffee grounds were their first choice to use a natural filler in the mixture. "Coffee grounds have many practical uses – you can use them as pest repeller, and they can absorb undesirable odors in the fridge," she says. "They can also be used as an exfoliating agent in facial scrub. Even so, most people just throw it out. We offer a new alternative to reuse this."

The pair began collecting their own coffee waste and soon moved on to collecting from family and friends, Now cafes and offices are also keeping their leftover grounds to be reused. Tamasi and Borsodi are also looking at other forms of kitchen waste too, experimenting with using leftover eggshells and the stones from inside peaches.

They're always looking to improve their base mixture as well as the designs. "We're constantly improving the material and we always come up with new ideas about the use of this material," says Borsodi. "3D printing has the opportunity to make really unique objects and we want to take advantage of that."

For now, the focus is on homeware items, using the printer to create geometric shapes. Tamasi and Borsodi's goal is to start selling their products online and create a full time business.

Tamasi is also on the lookout for other students to join the project and further expand it. They hope seeing items like theirs will encourage people to look at recycled products in a different way and invest in recycled pieces.