Everyone Recycles!

Okay, maybe the title isn't exactly true, but recycling has become increasingly popular recently. In NUS, many initiatives have popped up, to encourage the student population to recycle. Some examples: 

Recycling of electronic waste in NUS

Recycling of clothes in NUS

So we have the collection of waste for recycling. The real question is... Where does this go? And what happens to them?

I will use the recycling of electronic waste as an example. In Singapore, most of our recycling is sent to specialized local recycling facilities such as Climelia Resource Recovery Pte Ltd and TES-AMM (Singapore) Pte Ltd. Their main activity is to recover the precious metals found in our electronic waste. The other recyclables that come with our electronic waste like plastics and metals are also dealt with. 

If you guys are concerned about the emissions of gaseous waste when it comes to recovering the precious metals, worry no longer. TES-AMM uses a hydrometallurgical process which produces very little emissions. In this process, the precious metals are leached to form cathodes, powders, or compounds recovered from a solution.¹ 

Personally, these initiatives are a fantastic idea. I feel that this makes people, students in this case, more aware of the waste they produce, and at the same time, letting them know that there's something they can do about it. Killing two birds with one stone! However, I feel that the posters should hold a bit more information, or have a link to a website, or even a QR code, to give the public more information about where these recyclables are sent to and what the process is like. 

Literature cited:

Peters, E. "Hydrometallurgical Process Innovation." Hydrometallurgy, Theory and Practice Proceedings of the Ernest Peters International Symposium. Part A 29.1 (1992): 431-59. Sciencedirect. Web. 26 Aug. 2014