Progress in recycling of automobile shredder residue

摘要

At Argonne National Laboratory, we have been developing a potentially economical process to recycle automobile shredder residue (ASR). We identified three potentially marketable materials that can be recovered from ASR and developed technologies to recover and upgrade these materials. We build and tested a field-demonstration plant for recycling polyurethane foam and produced about 2000 lb of recycled foam. Several 300-lb samples were sent for evaluation and were found to be of marketable quality. We are also preparing for a large-scale test in which about 200 tons of ASR-derived fines will be used as a raw material in cement making. A major cement company has evaluated small samples of fines prepared in the laboratory and found that they meet its requirements as a substitute for iron ore or mill scale. We also produced about 50 lb of recycled acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) from obsolete automobiles and found that it has properties that could be readily upgraded to meet the specifications of the automotive industry. In this paper, we briefly discuss the process as a whole and summarize the results obtained from the field work on foam and fines recycling.