

Poland To Introduce Recyclable Subway Cars in 2012 - techverde
http://crispgreen.com/2010/11/poland-to-introduce-recyclable-subway-cars-in-2012/

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iwr
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?

~~~
_delirium
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...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060818-subway-
reef_2.html). Presumably they would've recycled them instead if the metal were
easily reclaimable and had significant scrap value?

~~~
thingie
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.

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nice1
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?

