Futuristic Recycling

Futuristic Recycling Ideas That Could Be Reality By 2050

The recycling industry has seen so many changes over the decades. As early as the late-1800s, men were going from one home to the next looking for worn-out clothing. Why? Companies bought the “rags” to turn them into paper and hired men to collect those rags. This was just the beginning. Every decade, recycling advances. Where will it be 10, 20, or 30 years from now?

Recycling is changing. It has to change. Students are being challenged to come up with ways to recycle items that are hard to recycle. Scientists are working on new and effective ways to recycle. Check out these futuristic recycling ideas that could be a reality in the next 30 years.

Robotic Trash Sorting Could you imagine having a trash can that tells you if an item is recyclable? It’s possible with a project some California middle school students completed. They came up with a Raspberry Pi robot that takes a picture of an item and determines if it’s a food scrap, recyclable item, or trash. Instead of struggling to decide if #7 plastic goes into the trash or recycling bin, the robot helps you. If you think about where this could go, it’s an amazing thought.

You could eventually have multiple bins set up inside or outside your house and simply deposit your item into a slot, let the robot decide where it goes, and have the right door open for that item to fall into.

Food Scrap Processing Turned Into Animal Food: Some companies are already using recycled jeans and denim to create insulation for walls and ceilings. A group of Florida students came up with a new plan that’s even better. It’s estimated that an empty potato chip bag takes over 80 years to fully decompose. These students shredded dozens of cleaned, emptied potato chip bags and turned it into long-lasting, effective insulation. Not only did tests find the insulation was effective, but it is also much cheaper than traditional insulation products and just takes a shredder capable of cutting the bags into the right width.

Food Scrap Processing Turned Into Animal Food: China is using the larva from a specific type of fly to devour food scraps from restaurants. The larva of 2.5 pounds of black soldier fly can devour more than a pound of food waste per hour. Those larvae then become food for poultry, fish, turtles, and even adventurous humans.

Plastic and Rubber Roads: Some areas tested ground-up rubber tires as a substitute for asphalt. Arizona decided to do a three-year trial of rubber asphalt to see if it cut road noise. The study found that asphalt rubber reduced road noise by up to 12 decibels. Today, rubber asphalt is on roads in several states including Arizona, California, South Carolina, Texas, and Washington. This led to the idea that ground-up plastic could also be used. In 2020, California finished paving sections of a highway near Oroville. Each mile of pavement used up more than 150,000 plastic water bottles. The original road surface was lifted by the same machine that ends up paving the road. As it lifts and grinds the old surface, it mixes it with the plastic bottle fragments. Once mixed with bitumen (sludge from oil refining), it is used to resurface the road. Not only are plastic bottles being recycled, but the process also reuses the existing road surface. If the road surfaces last, other climates could be next for these tests. Soon, all roads in the U.S. could contain rubber or plastic asphalt.