CompuServe Messages

Don, that's part of what I am trying to get across. Do NOT seperate the materials prior to reaching the processing facility, which would probably be best set up near the landfill for that 10% of materials that is best buried. The processing facility would have the requisite machinery, be it operated by a computer, or just cheap help, to disassemble that which requires disassembly, and otherwise reduce the trash to small chunks. Seperate out all the metals and melt them. From there, use various techniques to refine them, if needed, although there should be some call for generic metal, content unknown. Due to the high amounts of aluminum and steel used in most metal objects, you could come up with a seperation procedure just based upon gravitic seperation. Heck, from the metals, you may even be able to recover precious metals, as an added side line. Recovery of Copper would be cost effective as well. For plastics, use air blasts to seperate out the light stuff and mulch it for use as filler, recyled bottles, etc. For fibers, greenery, cellulose, etc., just seperate it, grind it to a fine powder, reconstruct to something the size of peanuts, and you can use it for animal feed, packing material, packaging, etc. As you stated, the current methods suggested for recovery of recyclable material, by forcing it at the consumer level are ineffective and cost prohibitive since the methods used do not recover costs, let alone make a profit for the firm. By switching to a processing station approach, you would gain the benefits of economy of scale, reduced reliance on the source properly sorting the material, and perhaps several profitable sidelines. Just a thought. Brian Bartlett