CSAR lecture: Is recycling just a load of rubbish?

Speaker: Dr Claire Barlow, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge

Or what should we be doing with our end-of-life materials?

We use a lot of stuff, and then throw it away so that it becomes someone else’s problem. What happens to our rubbish? How much of it could have a second life as something useful? How does this fit with the need to make money? But the bottom line is that we need to become more frugal with the earth’s resources, and end-of-life materials have a big part to play. In jargon, we need to move from a linear material usage model to a circular economy.

The answers are very variable depending on the type of material and what has been done to it to make the products that we use. Recycling is part of the picture, but it may not be the only solution and may not be the best approach in some cases. How does it stack up in environmental and economic terms? We will explore different approaches to closing the materials usage loop particularly for metals and plastics and consider what optimal practices might look like.

This talk is part of the Cambridge Society for the Application of Research (CSAR) series.