Poland To Introduce Recyclable Subway Cars in 2012 | Hacker News Reader

Poland To Introduce Recyclable Subway Cars in 2012

crispgreen.com

14 pointstechverde9 comments

The simplest way is to just make the thing out of metal. Over 90% of metals (especially so if they're easy to extract) gets recycled. Metal recycling is economical and has been happening before the concept of "recycling" was invented.

Aside from that, did they also make the cars biodegradable? How about natural, locally-produced, hand-grown(hand-mined?) materials?

Using metal does seem to be the bulk of the strategy; the chassis and carriage will be aluminum.

I agree that the article isn't very clear on why existing cars aren't recyclable, and how this improves it. I could imagine that there are subway cars being produced in the past 10-20 years that are harder to recycle due to a bunch of plastic components, perhaps. Or, there might be issues in how the cars are constructed that make separating out the recyclable components unreasonably expensive?

It does seem to be the case that, whatever the reason, subway cars often aren't recycled. For example, New York repurposed a bunch of its old cars by sinking them to make artificial reefs: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060818-subwa.... Presumably they would've recycled them instead if the metal were easily reclaimable and had significant scrap value?

Aim of a transit authority isn't to get most of the metal back, but to dispose the vehicles as cheaply as possible. To conform with environmental regulations, labor safety, etc., is quite expensive. That's why you can find so many old German trams across the eastern Europe. German authorities eagerly "sold" their old trams for pretty much any cost (like 1 euro and pick-up), rather than scrap them, which would cost money and not bring that enough in scrap.

They probably didn't recycle those cars because they were full of asbestos. There was some controversy then about sinking them, though of course fish don't get mesothelioma. (I suppose toxins are the same reason electronic recycling is harder than it seems like it should be.)

Usually the hardest part with recycling is separating out the materials, especially once you start having components that are potentially toxic. For example, you could have an all metal subway car that has asbestos insulation... now your recycling cost is huge. Probably cheaper now to just bury the whole thing.

Recycling can raise or lower the cost of disposal, depending on construction and materials. Heavy use of adhesives pretty much makes recycling a nightmare, as well as complex mixes of plastics.

Indeed. It's mostly an article about Warsaw getting some new subway cars[1], which isn't particularly interesting vehicle (well, it is, but they are so much same for anyone outside the engineering/railfan world), so they had to come up with some catchy headline… Most subway cars in the world are "recyclable" in the same manner (and perhaps even efficiency). I don't see anything very special here, it seems to be just a modern lightweight subway car, made mostly from aluminium.

[1] Not interesting enough to make it to HN, IMHO.

Probably one step back. Without knowing precisely how the bidding system goes for Polish subway cars, I'm going to guess that there were multiple competing bids for building new subway cars. They were all about the same, except one of them said "Lookee, our cars will be recyclable!"

The critical reader might, at this point, say "Hey wait a minute, subway cars are made almost entirely of metal and metal is always recyclable, so you're really not saying much of importance there". However, it suits everyone just fine to pretend it's a significantly greener option, from the company to the politicians to the media outlets who publish their press releases, so here we are.

No, it doesn't work this way, bidders compete on criteria that are part of the bid announcement, like price, local jobs and offsets, technical parameters and so on (oh, sure, corruption too, sometimes, but that's another story). This sound overly paranoid and pessimistic.

Why the hell would you want a recyclable subway car? I can understand bottles or shopping bags - lots of which get thrown in the garbage daily. But subway cars? Are they supposed to like break and be replaced after a week of use? WTF?

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