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A recycling plant in England has created the world’s first socially and environmentally responsible way to process asbestos.
Thermal Recycling in the West Midlands city of Wolverhampton, it can take asbestos, remove it from the cement with which it is mixed, and convert “chrysotile asbestos into a material that is no more harmful than the cement from which it is derived.”
Famous as an electrical insulator and building material, asbestos is now well known for its health hazards, as breathing in the long silicate fibers that are released into the air when the material is cut or broken can cause fatal lung diseases.
Thermal Recycling has developed a process to “denature”, as in “remove the nature of” asbestos by heating the material in a special oven that passed environmental regulations and that will be operational in 2021.
“To date, nearly 200 tests have been performed on the treated material using polarized light microscopy,” Thermal Recycling explains on its website. “Asbestos has not been detected in any of these tests. We have also carried out eight scanning electron microscopy tests. These have also shown that asbestos has not been detected ”.
Their process not only removes the properties that make asbestos what it is, but it does so without any prior treatment of chemicals, as other denaturation processes might require. This reduces the costs of the final product and avoids the additional step of having to remove chemicals.
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President Graham Gould famous at the inauguration of its test plant that “we cannot keep putting asbestos in landfills for future generations to take care of”, highlighting the unfortunate reality of asbestos removal down to its groundbreaking innovation.
Thermal Recycling was also received the Innovate UK smart grant, which they will use to identify the exact best use for the asbestos cement aggregate material left over from their process.
The market value of this process could be immeasurable, as despite its toxicity and banned status in 55 different countries, asbestos is it is still mined in millions of metric tons worldwide each year.
Russia produces about one million metric tons from its mines in Asbest, northeast of Moscow, while China, the world’s second-largest producer, extracts about 400,000 metric tons each year. Brazil and Kazakhstan are also major chrysotile asbestos miners, and countries like India and Indonesia, although not large producers, import hundreds of thousands of tons each year.
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Aside from dumping the end-use product to landfills, thermal recycling is the only environmentally safe option, and the value of your process, in terms of gains or reductions in lung disease risk from dealing with asbestos removal in the future. , it might be priceless.
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