Material Recycling of Mixed Commercial Waste in Austria

The separate collection of waste materials such as glass, tin, aluminum, paper, plastic packaging materials by the municipal sector in Austria has been practiced successfully for nearly 20 years. ARA AG (Altstoff Recycling Austria), in Austria the top dog in the packaging collection, recently announced an increase in the amount of collected packaging by 34 % since 1995. Last year, the ARA-system collects more than 835,000 tons of packaging waste, going directly to material recycling or combustion (energy recovery). In addition to the municipal sector, commerce and industry also produce large quantities of recyclables. An increasing number, but not all of these materials, are internally recycled. Wastes are often given to municipal but also private collectors. This is increasingly a great hidden resource for waste materials. This utilization potential to use is also associated with the implementation of EU Directive 2006/12/EC. The so called Waste Framework Directive of the European Union (EU) is implemented with 15th of February 2011 in the amendment of the Austrian federal waste management act (AWG-novelette 2010). The directive sets a strict priority ranking. Here, the material recycling after prevention and reuse is clearly ahead of other waste treatment processes (e.g. mono- and co-incineration). In practice, there are limits for material recycling. Besides the quantity the complexity of waste continuously increases too. Especially very heterogeneous (waste) mixtures are in many ways problematic. The spreading use of valuable fractions is often difficult (large grain size spectrum, Gernot Kreindl 648 contamination, impurities etc.). This rapidly increases the technical effort to recover waste materials. Therefore pre-treatment and an appropriate material separation of commercial and industrial waste become an important role. The following chapters are dealing with the potential of waste recyclable materials in mixed commercial waste fractions. Furthermore, state of the art splitting and sorting techniques are described.

 

 

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