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.
我的工作是清潔垃圾 原因還蠻有趣的,我之所以選擇這個行業 正因為我極度厭惡垃圾 接下來十分鐘的演講 我希望能改變大家 對生活周遭物品的看法 就從最早的時期開始講起 回想一下小時候 你怎麼看待生活中的東西? 可能像一般小朋友心中的這套規則一樣 我先看到的東西都是我的 我在堆東西時成堆都是我的 我的東西愈多愈好 當然壞掉的都算是別人的
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
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.
從事回收產業二十年後 我更清楚地體認到 這些幼兒時期的規則 並沒有隨著我們長大而全部消失 讓我來說明這一點 每天,每一天 全世界的廢棄物回收場 處理著上百萬磅 人類製造的廢棄物 一天一百萬磅,聽起來似乎是很龐大的數量 但是這只佔每年全世界 被丟棄的耐用品的一小部分 低於比百分之一 事實上聯合國估計 每年大約有八百五十億磅的 電子廢棄物 被棄置在全世界 這類垃圾正快速成長中 如果加上其它被丟棄的耐用品,像是車子之類的 總數還會增加到兩倍以上 當然一個國家的發展程度愈高 堆積的垃圾山就愈大
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.
看到垃圾山時 多數人只想到垃圾 我們卻看到地上的礦山 我們認定它是礦山,是因為這些被丟棄的物品 當初都是由許多貴重的稀有金屬原料製成的 在極度錯綜複雜的垃圾堆中 提煉出原料的技術 變得愈來愈重要 一整周的TED演講都傳達一個訊息 隨著人口不斷增長,世界變得愈來愈小 每個人都想要更多的東西 當然,他們會想擁有這些 我們大部份人早已擁有的玩具跟工具
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.
我們每天所用的玩具跟工具 是用什麼材料製造的 主要是各種的塑膠和金屬 金屬原料 通常採自世界各地 不斷擴大的礦坑 或是更深層的礦坑 而塑膠,則是來自石油 油田開採愈來愈偏遠 也愈來愈深 兩者背後 所牽扯的巨大的經濟和環境問題 直到今日,才逐漸浮現出來
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.
好消息是我們開始在使用過的物品中找回有用的材料 並且開始回收這類物品 世界上有些地區,例如歐洲 回收政策已經落實 並明確要求人們 必須盡責地回收物品 這些用過的物品,交給回收公司後 所提煉出來的成份主要是金屬 為了讓大家更清楚了解 我用鋼來說明整個金屬回收的情況 因為鋼是最普遍的金屬 當你把東西交給回收公司 幾乎百分之九十的金屬 將會被找到而且重新使用 塑膠就完全不同了 不到百分之十的塑膠被回收 實際上的數據是大約百分之五左右 其餘都被焚化或是用於填埋
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.
多數人的觀念裡,塑膠本來就是用完即丟 沒有什麼價值 但實際上,塑膠要比鋼貴上數倍 以容積來比的話 全世界每年的塑膠生產與消耗量 也比起金屬更多 塑膠不僅數量龐大又值錢 為什麼它被回收利用的比例 卻不如那些價格較低的材料呢 主要原因在於 從其他材料與其他金屬中 重新提煉金屬較為容易 金屬的密度彼此相異 電性跟磁性等特性都不同 外觀顏色也不同 因此無論是倚賴人力或是機器 都能在多種金屬或其他材料中 分離出金屬 不同類別的塑膠卻有相近甚至相同的密度 電性與磁性 也是近似或完全相同 塑膠可以有各種顏色 這一點大家大多知道 所以傳統的材料分離法 不適用在塑膠上
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.
金屬比較容易被回收還有另一個因素 大多數的廢棄物是來自已開發國家 很遺憾地說,特別是像美國這樣的國家 欠缺歐洲早已實施的回收政策又有許多廢棄物 他們便將開發中國家 當作是廉價回收廢棄物的管道 那裡的人僅以一天一美金的低價去撿拾我們的廢棄物 並竭盡所能地提取出有用的物質 大多是金屬類或電路板等 然後丟棄無法回收的物質 這些大部分都是塑膠類 或是在這樣的焚燒場中 燃燒塑膠以取出內含的金屬成分 他們以手工具提煉金屬 這也許是低經濟成本的解決之道 但絕非低環境成本的策略 也違反人類健康安全的考量 我稱之為環境套利交易 這不公平,不安全 而且無法永續發展
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.
塑膠製品大量出現 順便一提 有些方法顯然並不能真正地回收塑膠 但人們確實努力嘗試這麼做 這裡有個例子 這張照片是我站在印度孟買一個貧民窟的屋頂拍的 它是世界上最大的貧民窟之一 他們把塑膠存放於屋頂 之後,拿進屋內像這樣的小型工作坊 他們努力的將塑膠分類 用顏色,形狀,觸感 以及任何派得上用場的技巧 有時候採取所謂的「燃燒嗅聞法」 就是將塑膠燃燒後 以產生的煙味來判斷分辨塑膠的種類 這些技巧無法大量地 運用在塑膠回收 提醒大家 切勿在家嘗試這類技巧
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.
我們該怎麼處理這些太空時代的材料 我們以前還宣稱塑膠是太空時代的材料呢 我承認塑膠太過珍貴,數量也太過龐大 不該被埋回地裡 或燒成煙霧 大約二十年前,我開始在車庫裡東試西試 嘗試去分離 這些特質相似的物質 還拉了許多朋友一起幫忙 特別是在礦業界跟在塑膠業界的朋友 我們拜訪世界各地的礦物分析實驗室 畢竟我們正在做的是地上礦物的開採 終於我們破解了其中的奧秘 這是回收領域的最新發展 也是地球上的重要材料中 最後一種被大量回收的 我們終於知道方法了 我們重新創造出 塑膠業界製造塑膠的程序
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.
傳統塑膠製造的方法 是使用石油或是石化原料 將分子分解後,以非常特殊的方法重新組合 去製造各種我們每天都在使用的美好塑膠製品 而我們認為一定有一套永續的塑膠製造法 它不僅僅要確保環境上的永續發展 也能促進經濟的常久發展 從垃圾做起是個不錯的想法 它不會像石油那麼昂貴 而且數量龐大 如同你在圖片中看到的一樣 我們未採用傳統先分解成分子 再重新組合的方式 而是以採礦的方式提煉材料
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.
工廠設備只需 相當低的資本 能源消耗也節省了許多 我不知道這個地球上有多少專案像我們一樣 在能源的使用上 比起傳統方法節省了百分之八十到九十 與其投入上億的資產 去建座化學工廠 卻僅能生產單一種類的塑膠 我們的工廠 ,提供任何塑膠,即可產出同種類的塑膠 我們提供的替代塑膠 取代了一般石化廠的製品 我們個客戶很滿意 省下了大量的二氧化碳排放 他們得以致力於產品改善 並製造更多永續性的產品
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.
在這簡短的演講中 我想讓大家對我們的作業流程有些概念 第一個步驟是金屬回收機,他們將回收品切成小碎塊 從中挑出金屬 剩下的就叫粉碎殘餘物,是金屬回收的垃圾 非常複雜的混合物 主要成分是塑膠 我們取出非塑膠類的成份 像是被忽略掉的金屬、地毯料、泡沬橡皮、合成橡膠 木材、玻璃、紙、舉凡你能想到的都有 不幸地有時會發現動物屍體 這些是作業流程的第一步驟,與傳統回收作業相似 篩選材料的方法,有時使用磁鐵 或空氣分級法 有點像是電影巧克力冒險工廠電影裡威利‧旺卡的工廠
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.
這個步驟完成後,會得到塑膠混合物 包含許多種類 以及各種等級的塑膠 接著進行比較精密複雜 也是是真正困難的部分,就是多階段的分離程序 我們把這些塑膠碾成小指指甲般大小 使用高度自動化設備 進行挑選分類 依類型和等級 這個步驟最後 會得到小塑膠薄片 有不同種類,不同等級 然後用光學方法進行顏色分類 在50000磅的儲存槽中混合後 把材料擠入押出機,在機器中熔化後 擠過模孔 形成像義大利麵形狀的塑膠條 然後將長條切成顆粒 這就是塑膠粒 這就是塑膠業界的基本原物料 和以石油中製造成的塑膠粒 完全相同 而今天 我們是從你的廢棄舊物中製造出來 它將成為新物品,重回到我們的生活
(Applause)
(鼓掌)
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.
如今,你的舊物不再堆放在 開發中國家的垃圾山裡 也不會被焚化成煙 你的舊物 將以新產品的樣貌重回你的書桌上 回到你的辦公室 回到你的家裡繼續發揮效能 這些只是我們下游廠商的部分產品 他們以我們的塑膠 取代以往由原料製成的塑膠 並以回收塑膠製造新產品
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."
我希望我已經改變 大家對一些生活用品的看法 大自然給了我們啟示 大自然幾乎不浪費任何東西 它重複使用每一項資源 我希望你不再將自己視為一名消費者 我這輩子都厭惡這個名稱 設想你自己只是以某種形式在使用資源 有一天,這資源會以另一個樣貌 另一項功能出現 最後,我希望大家同意我 稍微修改「小朋友守則」的最後一條 新守則是:所有壞掉的東西都是我的
Thank you for your time.
感謝你的聆聽
(Applause)
(鼓掌)