As an effective measure of addressing global warming and environmental pollution, advanced countries adopt recycling of waste resources as a national agenda. And development of resource recycling technologies is recognized as an essential factor for enhancing resource recycling rate and competitiveness. Emergence of resource recycling industry as a new industry for sustainable development urgently requires improvement of conventional technologies or development of new technologies to improve quality of recycled resources and increase added value.
While Korea encourages the industry to recycle waste resources in electrical, electronic and automotive areas, the recycling industry is too small in scale and insufficient in investment to develop recycling technologies. Moreover, recycling technologies are combined with advanced technologies such as laser, plasma, supercritical and ultrasonic technologies, while the trend of environment-related technologies is shifting to resource recycling technology-combined green technologies by converging with environment technology (ET), information technology (IT), bio-technology (BT) and nano technology (NT).
To develop recycling technologies and recycle collected wastes into economically useful resources, Korea’s Ministry of Environment established in 2011 the R&D Center for Valuable Recycling(CEO Bong-Gyoo Cho). With the goal of commercializing global top technologies for sustainable resource recycling society, the Center has been developing eco-friendly, highly efficient and high valued resource recycling technologies, investing a total of KRW150 billion (approximately $132.7 million) for 10 years.
At the Re-Tech 2017, a recycling and waste management exhibition held on September 6~8, 2017 at KINTEX in Goyang, the Center showcased its major projects and new technologies, including technologies for recycling valuable materials from waste polyurethane, waste deNOx catalyst, and scrapped permanent magnets as well as optical sorting technology.
With financial support of the Ministry of Environment, the Center is primarily developing technologies for recycling four major waste resources, including those from electrical and electronic industries, and automotive industry, as well as metals/inorganic materials, and organic low-grade waste resources. For more efficient recycling of end-of-life electrical and electronic appliances, it is developing technologies for scrapping, smashing, sorting and collecting substances for full cyclical recycling of resources. As waste vehicles have much valuable resources and parts, such as metals, nonferrous metals and plastic, it is developing technologies for recycling these resources. While substantial amount of fly ashes generated at thermal power plants is recycled, flooring materials, and various catalysts such as deNOx catalyst and desulfurization catalyst, which contain much useful metal resources, are required to be recycled. And majority of organic low-grade waste resources are either incinerated or recycled in simple way, requiring proper recycling technologies.
And the Center is carrying out a large variety of R&D projects to develop technologies for recycling waste resources. They include projects of collecting rare earth from scrapped permanent magnets; developing technology of recycling silicon mixed sludge; technology of collecting cobalt, manganese, zinc, nickel, lithium and copper from waste resources; technologies of reducing harmful chemical substances contained in waste water from manufacturing processes and collecting valuable metals; technologies of collecting rare metals from waste deNOx catalyst; technologies of recycling scrapped displays for economically collecting useful resources from metals, plastics and LCD glasses; technologies of manufacturing polyol, material for producing urethane foam; and technologies of physically and chemically recycling waste PET bottles, films, textiles and sludge in manufacturing processes of PET materials.