Recycling Pallets and Polystyrene

[Dathi]

Greetings,
Some wise people out there may have some suggestions!

In my travels around the working world I have noticed a recent phenomena. Many factories / plants have a huge build-up of pallets, plastics and metals. This is a direct consequence of economic conditions. Yesterday I was at a place where the yard was so clogged up with junk that vehicles and people could not move safely. Recyclers are not interested in removing "stuff" and indeed many recycling plants have closed down.
One particular issue is polystyrene packaging. It is bulky, messy and awkward to handle and few municiple waste facilities are prepared to take it, even with compacting. It is nasty stuff anyway.
The backside has fallen out of the steel markets (no construction or car manufacturing happening) and thus metal waste (including compacted cars) cannot be sold.
Stacks of wooden pallets are piling up all over the show as far fewer are needed due to a general contraction of commercial activity. All those trees

It strikes me that this is yet another aspect of the "credit crunch crisis" that has not yet received enough attention.

And yet there must be some sort of practical opportunity out there to reuse all this wasted material. I did see a low-cost housing initiative in Africa many years ago whereby polystyrene mixed with concrete was used to rapidly build basic houses.

Any thoughts?

Dathi

PS: Some links relating to these issues:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/12 ... _we_do.php
http://www.verdant.net/nofoam.htm
http://www.wasteonline.org.uk/resources ... astics.htm

[Corwen]

Interesting questions. Pallets are a great building material in themselves and source of free timber, but time being money folk just don't want the hassle of pulling them apart and getting the nails out. A lot of them are poplar which is quite a decent hardwood too. My Dad made the deposit on his first house on the back of breaking up pallets and selling them for kindling from a handcart in Poole in the late 60s, but houses were a lot cheaper then! Of course you can burn them but the labour involved in chopping them up is much more than sawing up logs for the same amount of firewood.

The problem with plystyrene is that the stuff sold as packing isn't fire retardant so it can't be used for its obvious use of insulation as this would breach building codes. The best re-use for it is as packaging and I use entirely recycled packaging when I send instruments out, its so cheap though that again big businesses don't have any incentive to recycle it, especially as landfills charge by weight not by bulk.

I know of people who use it in place of crocks in the bottoms of pots but I wouldn't want to eat anything grown with its roots in the stuff!

Obviously better biodegradable forms of packaging are the solution but in the mean time once polystyrene's been made I don't think theres much that can be done with it