I'm a garbage man. And you might find it interesting that I became a garbage man, because I absolutely hate waste. I hope, within the next 10 minutes, to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life. And I'd like to start at the very beginning. Think back when you were just a kid. How did look at the stuff in your life? Perhaps it was like these toddler rules: It's my stuff if I saw it first. The entire pile is my stuff if I'm building something. The more stuff that's mine, the better. And of course, it's your stuff if it's broken.
我是垃圾清洁工 你也许会发现这其实非常有趣 因为我非常讨厌垃圾 我希望在这10分钟内 可以改变大家对于 生活中很多东西的看法 我希望从最开始的时候讲起 回想一下你还是个孩子的时候 你怎么看你身边的事物? 也许就像这些儿童法则: 我第一个发现就是我的 如果我在做一个东西,那么它全部都归我 我的东西越多越好 当然,如果坏了的话,那就是你的了
(Laughter)
(笑声)
Well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry, it's become pretty clear to me that we don't necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults. And let me tell you why I have that perspective. Because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people's discarded stuff. Now a million pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff, but it's a tiny drop of the durable goods that are disposed each and every year around the world -- well less than one percent. In fact, the United Nations estimates that there's about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year -- and that's one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream. And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth, that number well more than doubles. And of course, the more developed the country, the bigger these mountains.
在再生资源产业工作了20年后 我非常清楚一点 那就是当我们成人以后,不一定就要抛弃 儿童法则 让我来解释一下其中的原因 因为每一天 全世界的垃圾回收厂 要处理大约一百万磅 人们废弃的东西 一百万磅听起来好像是很多的东西 但这只是全世界每年 废弃的耐用品的九牛一毛-- 少于1% 事实上,联合国估计 每年大约有八百五十亿磅的 电子垃圾 在世界范围上被丢弃-- 这是增长速度最快的垃圾种类之一 如果算上其他的耐用物品比如汽车之类的话 那数量可能会增加一倍多 当然,国家越发展 这个数量就越多
Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage. We see above-ground mines. And the reason we see mines is because there's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place. And it's becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams. Because as we've heard all week at TED, the world's getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff. And of course, they want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted.
现在当大家看见这些山的时候 多数人会认为是垃圾 我们却看见了一个地上矿场 我们这么看的原因是,那其中有许多有价值的 可以再造这些东西的原材料 这种转化正在变得愈加重要 我会阐述是如何把这些彻底的废品 提炼成这些原材料的 就像我们在TED听到过的 随着人口和人类物欲的增长, 世界正在变得越来越小 当然 想拥有玩具和工具 多数人觉得是理所应当的
And what goes into making those toys and tools that we use every single day? It's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals. And the metals, we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world. And the plastics, we get from oil, which we go to more remote locations and drill ever deeper wells to extract. And these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we're already starting to see today.
我们每天都在用的工具和玩具 是用什么做的呢? 主要是各种塑料和金属原料 金属原料,我们一般 从分布在世界上的 广阔的矿山 或者是深层矿场所开采的矿石中获取 我们通过石油获得塑料 我们到更加偏僻的地方 然后不断加深钻井抽出原油 这些工作 对于经济和环境都有重要的影响 这种影响我们现在已经开始看到
The good news is we are starting to recover materials from our end-of-life stuff and starting to recycle our end-of-life stuff, particularly in regions of the world like here in Europe that have recycling policies in place that require that this stuff be recycled in a responsible manner. Most of what's extracted from our end-of-life stuff, if it makes it to a recycler, are the metals. To put that in perspective -- and I'm using steel as a proxy here for metals, because it's the most common metal -- if your stuff makes it to a recycler, probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose. Plastics are a whole other story: well less than 10 percent are recovered. In fact, it's more like five percent. Most of it's incinerated or landfilled.
好消息是我们正在开始恢复这些正在枯竭的物质 同时正在开始回收利用它们 特别是我们所在的欧洲 已经出台相应的回收政策 要求这些物质应当以负责的态度 被回收利用 大多数我们从即将枯竭的资源中所提取的物质 如果说可被循环使用的,那就是金属 为了便于理解-- 我在这里用钢作代表 因为它是最常用的金属-- 如果你可以进行回收利用 大约超过90%的金属 将会被回收利用同时会被用于其它用途 塑料制品则完全不同 仅有不到10%被回收 实际上,只有差不多5% 多数都被焚化或填埋
Now most people think that's because plastics are a throw-away material, have very little value. But actually, plastics are several times more valuable than steel. And there's more plastics produced and consumed around the world on a volume basis every year than steel. So why is such a plentiful and valuable material not recovered at anywhere near the rate of the less valuable material? Well it's predominantly because metals are very easy to recycle from other materials and from one another. They have very different densities. They have different electrical and magnetic properties. And they even have different colors. So it's very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials. Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range. They have either identical or very similar electrical and magnetic properties. And any plastic can be any color, as you probably well know. So the traditional ways of separating materials just simply don't work for plastics.
如今多数人都认为塑料是废弃的材料 没什么用 但事实上,塑料要比钢的价值高出好几倍 同时,世界范围内塑料的生产和消耗 要比钢在数量上 高的多 所以为什么如此大量且有价值的原料 却不被回收利用,其回收率几近于 无价值的原料 一个明显的原因是 因为金属非常易于 从其它原料或金属中回收 它们的密度相同 有不同的电子特性和磁性 甚至颜色也不同 所以对于人和机器来说都非常容易 把它们从金属中 或从其它材料中分离开 塑料在一个非常小范围内存在着重叠密度 他们有相同的或是非常相似的 电子特性和磁性 任何塑料都可以是任意颜色 就像大家了解的那样 因此传统的分离材料的方法 不适用于塑料制品
Another consequence of metals being so easy to recycle by humans is that a lot of our stuff from the developed world -- and sadly to say, particularly from the United States, where we don't have any recycling policies in place like here in Europe -- finds its way to developing countries for low-cost recycling. People, for as little as a dollar a day, pick through our stuff. They extract what they can, which is mostly the metals -- circuit boards and so forth -- and they leave behind mostly what they can't recover, which is, again, mostly the plastics. Or they burn the plastics to get to the metals in burn houses like you see here. And they extract the metals by hand. Now while this may be the low-economic-cost solution, this is certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution. I call this environmental arbitrage. And it's not fair, it's not safe and it's not sustainable.
金属可以被人类如此方便回收的另一个原因是 许多原料都是来自发达国家-- 遗憾的说,大多来自美国 我们美国并没有任何像欧洲这边的相关回收政策-- 寻求发展中国家的 低成本回收 一天仅仅一美元的人力成本,来捡拾垃圾 他们挑出他们能挑出来的东西,大多都是金属-- 电路板等等-- 然后留下大部分他们不能回收的 其中多数还是塑料 或者他们焚烧掉塑料,然后得到金属 像这样在屋中焚烧 他们手工提取金属 也许这是低成本的解决方案 但这肯定是不环保 或不利于人类健康的解决方案 我称其为环境套利 这是不公平,不安全 不可持续发展的
Now because the plastics are so plentiful -- and by the way, those other methods don't lead to the recovery of plastics, obviously -- but people do try to recover the plastics. This is just one example. This is a photo I took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in Mumbai, India. They store the plastics on the roofs. They bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these, and people try very hard to separate the plastics, by color, by shape, by feel, by any technique they can. And sometimes they'll resort to what's known as the "burn and sniff" technique where they'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic. None of these techniques result in any amount of recycling in any significant way. And by the way, please don't try this technique at home.
因为当今塑料太多了-- 同时 那些其他的方法也明显的不能回收塑料-- 但人类确实在尝试着回收塑料 这就是个例子 这张照片是我站在屋顶上拍摄的 世界上最大的贫民窟之一,在印度孟买 他们把塑料储存在屋顶 屋顶下面是像这样的小作坊 人们非常努力地进行塑料分类 根据颜色,形状,感觉等 一切他们掌握的技术 有时他们会采取“燃烧和闻”的技术 也就是他们点燃塑料然后闻气味 来判定塑料的类型 这些技术对于没有对回收量起到 任何显著的作用 顺便提一下 请不要在家里尝试这种技术
So what are we to do about this space-age material, at least what we used to call a space-aged material, these plastics? Well I certainly believe that it's far too valuable and far too abundant to keep putting back in the ground or certainly send up in smoke. So about 20 years ago, I literally started in my garage tinkering around, trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other, and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends, in the mining world actually, and in the plastics world, and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world. Because after all, we're doing above-ground mining. And we eventually broke the code. This is the last frontier of recycling. It's the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the Earth. And we finally figured out how to do it. And in the process, we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics.
所以我们如何处理这些航空时代材料 至少我们以前这么叫,这些塑料? 我坚信它们实在是数量巨大的宝贵财富 所以不能让它们闲置在那 或是焚烧成一缕黑烟 所以大约20年前,我在车库里开始着手 尝试如何把这些非常相似的材料 互相分离 最终我结交了很多朋友 采矿业的朋友,塑料领域的朋友 我们开始拜访世界各地的采矿实验室 因为归根结底,我们做的是地上采矿业 我们最终解开了难题 这是回收领域最后的空白 这是地球上数量可观的 重要原料中,最后被回收利用的 最终我们找到了分类的方法 在这个过程中,我们开始再现了 塑料行业生产塑料制品的过程
The traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals. You breakdown the molecules, you recombine them in very specific ways, to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day. We said, there's got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics. And not just sustainable from an environmental standpoint, sustainable from an economic standpoint as well. Well a good place to start is with waste. It certainly doesn't cost as much as oil, and it's plentiful, as I hope that you've been able to see from the photographs. And because we're not breaking down the plastic into molecules and recombining them, we're using a mining approach to extract the materials.
传统的方法是 用石油或石油化学产品 把分子打乱,然后用一种特殊的方式进行重组 从而创造了我们每天都在享用着的很棒的塑料制品 我们认为,会有一种更可持续性的方式去生产塑料制品 这种可持续性不仅仅是站在环保的立场 也是从经济的角度上说的 垃圾是个很好的实验材料 成本肯定比石油要低得多 而且来源很多 正如我所希望的,大家已经可以从照片中看到 同时因为我们不是把塑料变成分子 然后进行重组 我们所用的是采矿的方法来提炼原料
We have significantly lower capital costs in our plant equipment. We have enormous energy savings. I don't know how many other projects on the planet right now can save 80 to 90 percent of the energy compared to making something the traditional way. And instead of plopping down several hundred million dollars to build a chemical plant that will only make one type of plastic for its entire life, our plants can make any type of plastic we feed them. And we make a drop-in replacement for that plastic that's made from petrochemicals. Our customers get to enjoy huge CO2 savings. They get to close the loop with their products. And they get to make more sustainable products.
用我们的设备 成本非常低 同时非常节能 我不清楚当今世界上其他项目中有多少 能在与传统生产方式比较中 节省80%到90%的能源 相比起砸下数百万美元 去建一个只能生产 一种类型塑料的化工厂来说 我们的工厂可以制造各种类型的塑料制品 我们为那些原料为石油化学产品 的塑料找到了替代原料 我们的客户享受到了 大量二氧化碳节约 他们 他们可以生产更可持续性的产品
In the short time period I have, I want to show you a little bit of a sense about how we do this. It starts with metal recyclers who shred our stuff into very small bits. They recover the metals and leave behind what's called shredder residue -- it's their waste -- a very complex mixture of materials, but predominantly plastics. We take out the things that aren't plastics, such as the metals they missed, carpeting, foam, rubber, wood, glass, paper, you name it. Even an occasional dead animal, unfortunately. And it goes in the first part of our process here, which is more like traditional recycling. We're sieving the material, we're using magnets, we're using air classification. It looks like the Willy Wonka factory at this point.
时间很有限 我想跟大家分享一点我们所作这些事情的感想 开始时用金属回收器,它可以把金属碾碎成小单位 然后他们把金属复原 同时把叫做回收余渣的东西丢弃--过程所产生的废物-- 一种非常复杂的混合物 但主要是塑料 我们取出非塑料物质 比如他们遗漏的金属,地毯,泡沫塑料,橡胶 木材,玻璃,纸张,大家来列举 甚至是死亡的动物 这就是我们工序的第一部分,看起来和传统回收差不多 我们用磁铁来筛选出金属物质 我们使用空气分离法 在这点上看起来像是Willy Wonka的工厂
At the end of this process, we have a mixed plastic composite: many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics. This goes into the more sophisticated part of our process, and the really hard work, multi-step separation process begins. We grind the plastic down to about the size of your small fingernail. We use a very highly automated process to sort those plastics, not only by type, but by grade. And out the end of that part of the process come little flakes of plastic: one type, one grade. We then use optical sorting to color sort this material. We blend it in 50,000-lb. blending silos. We push that material to extruders where we melt it, push it through small die holes, make spaghetti-like plastic strands. And we chop those strands into what are called pellets. And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry. This is the same material that you would get from oil. And today, we're producing it from your old stuff, and it's going right back into your new stuff.
工序的最后,我们要进行塑料混合 许多种塑料 和许多各种等级的塑料 这是我们所有工序中尖端的步骤 和最难的工作,多步分离过程的开始 我们把塑料碾碎到小拇指大小 我们采用高度自动化的工序 进行塑料分类 不仅仅依据类型分类还有等级 最后的工序之后 会产生小塑料薄片: 一种类型,一种等级 我们随后用光学分类进行颜色归类 我们把5万磅的混合物放进竖井 把这些原料放进挤压机进行溶解 使其通过小模孔 做成类似意大利面的线状塑料 然后把其砍断 变成我们所说的颗粒 这就变成了塑料行业中的货币 这种原料和用石油制造 的完全一样 而如今 我们用旧东西作为原料 同时马上就可以变旧为新
(Applause)
(掌声)
So now, instead of your stuff ending up on a hillside in a developing country or literally going up in smoke, you can find your old stuff back on top of your desk in new products, in your office, or back at work in your home. And these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic, replacing virgin plastic, to make their new products.
所以如今,与其让你的废弃物 成为发展中国家垃圾山的一部分 或是焚烧成黑烟 你可以找出你的旧东西 然后变旧为新,重回你的书桌上 办公室里 或回到你的家中 这些仅仅是使用我们提供塑料的 公司的一小部分案例 替换原始塑料 来制造新产品
So I hope I've changed the way you look at at least some of the stuff in your life. We took our clues from mother nature. Mother nature wastes very little, reuses practically everything. And I hope that you stop looking at yourself as a consumer -- that's a label I've always hated my entire life -- and think of yourself as just using resources in one form, until they can be transformed to another form for another use later in time. And finally, I hope you agree with me to change that last toddler rule just a little bit to: "If it's broken, it's my stuff."
所以我希望我已经改变了大家关于事物 的看法,至少是部分事物的看法 我们从自然中获得了提示 大自然几乎没有什么是废物 几乎都可以被重复使用 我希望大家不要把自己看成一个消费者-- 那是我一辈子痛恨的标签-- 把我们自己想成只是使用资源的一种形式 知道它们可以转变成另一种形式 之后再被其他人使用 最后,希望大家允许我 对最后一条儿童法则进行一点点修改 “如果东西坏了,那就是我(麦克)的东西了”
Thank you for your time.
谢谢大家
(Applause)
(掌声)