Recover and recycling of industrial materials

The economic structure of our society tends to consider us as consumers, and for this reason we are always pushed by advertisement and trends to buy or change products that maybe we don’t need: in so doing we reduce the products lifetime.

This behavior on one side favors factories, which increase their productivity but on the other side makes the problem of waste disposal even worse, with bad consequence for our environment and for ourselves as well.

In all the production steps, there is a big industrial waste, i.e. materials produced and eliminated during the several steps of production. When we hot-work metals through pressure die casting dies vacuum machines, we produce metal dust, when we plane a piece of wood, we produce chips, and so on. All these materials are called production waste.

One part of this waste, produced by factories, becomes rubbish, while the other part can be recycled and used as starting materials for other products. For examples wooden chips are usually used to produce chipboard panels. These materials are called second materials, because they have the same functions of raw materials but they’ve already been used once.

The recycling of these second materials is very important since it can help preventing pollution, which usually happens when they are thrown away as rubbish. Hopefully nowadays recycling of industrial waste is becoming more and more frequent also because it has several advantages: it can lead to a high energy saving and it can also reduce working hours, since the first step of product production — that of raw materials ‘ production — is completely by-passed.