Recycling is a process whose main objective is to care for the environment. It is often considered to be a business effort that increases costs and that is carried out, for the most part, in favour of third parties who will benefit from a cleaner ecosystem, but the company that decides to carry it out can also be favoured. That’s why recycling is not only characterised by the generation of positive externalities but also by the fact that it is a process that contributes both to third parties and to its implementer.
The question that pops up is: how can recycling benefit economically the company that carries it out?. At first glance, the opposite would seem to be true, as business processes will have to be adapted to the process, which will entail costs, but the reality is that recycling can contribute to reducing the consumption of one of the most important commodities in industry: energy.
The direct extraction of certain raw materials involves high energy costs. For example, recycling aluminium can save more than 90% of the energy that would be used if the same amount of aluminium were to be obtained from its primary source. Spain’s Institute for Energy Diversification and Saving (IDEA in Spanish) states that the energy required to manufacture a single aluminium can from virgin material could run a television for two hours. Imagine the energy savings if the thousands of cans consumed every day in a country were made from recycled material.
At the same time, since aluminium is not a degradable material, the recycling process can be carried out infinitely. Therefore, by modifying the production process in favour of recycling, not only an operational cost but also savings can be made.
Recycling processes thus save energy in two ways. On the one hand, savings due to the absence of extraction costs for virgin raw materials and, on the other hand, the savings that come from producing from reusable materials. Recycling makes it possible to move from a linear production economy to a circular production economy in which the goods already produced are once again the protagonists, generating countless benefits for both present and future generations.
AMV Soluciones facilitates the characterisation of scrap so that more companies can choose to use scrap without affecting the quality of their final product or their production times. We are committed both to the environment and to optimising the processes and resources of the people who trust us. Get to know us!
