Discoveries in the chemical field started industrial production in many fields and with them the need to reuse waste

The chemical revolution, which from 1700 on the most advanced European nations, highlighted the first environmental problems created by the waste of chemical production. At that time, along with the new discoveries, the search for reuse of man-made waste began.

The first industrial chemical process,in the modern sense, was invented in 1791, by the French chemist Nicolas Leblanc (1742-1806), for the production of sodium carbonate in two steps.

Leblanc had, however, a troubled working life as his research was initially funded by the Duke of Orleans Filippo Egalité,with the hope of winning the prize put up for grabs by the French Academy of Sciences in order to start industrial production.

However, in 1793 the Duke was executed and Leblanc’s patents were not recognized as valid, also receiving the confiscation of the production plant and the rejection of the desired prize. Although Napoleon returned the factory to him in 1802, without a cash prize, Leblanc did not have the economic strength to leave and in 1806 he committed a comdity.

The first step in the production process of the Leblanc method was to deal with the sodium chloride with sulfuric acid, which was formed in sodium sulfate, creating a waste in the form of gaseous hydrochloric acid, which for a long time it was released into the atmosphere with serious problems to the populations that lived in the vicinity of the factories and with the destruction of the surrounding vegetation.

The second step was to heat the sodium sulfate with charcoal and calcium carbonate, a mixture with which sodium carbonate and calcium sulfide, which was not soluble in water, were the solid waste of the process and was discarded by forming piles in the open air. During exposure to rain, hydrogen sulfide, harmful and smelly gas was released.

Residents began notable protests against air pollution, effectively creating the first ecological protests, which prompted soda industrialists to look for solutions to the problem.

On that occasion the chemical industry discovered that it was possible to recover something useful and sellable from the waste, in fact chloride acid was possible to obtain chlorine, a commodity that was understood to have its own final market and from calcium sulfide it was possible to recover sulfur, which would be sold to factories of sulfur acid.

In the 19th century, when the heavy steel industry began to flourish, the inventor French Pierre Emile Martin (1824-1915) in 1865 developed an oven that could decarbonize cast iron on a large scale and could be loaded with molten cast iron but also with scrap of iron.

During the nineteenth century, in fact, such scraps were accumulating as a result of the replacement of old machinery with new ones, so this waste became second raw materials, as we call them today.

The 20th century saw industrial progress grow continuously and swirling, going from two world wars, a great economic-industrial crisis, the conquest of space, new technologies, widespread well-being, the cold war with the race to create atomic arsenals, the displacement for work and tourism of large masses of people through the aeronautical industry, the development of satellites and communication technologies have fuelled a new market of equipment. , also driven by the new artificial intelligence that makes us communicate through computers.

All this progress has created an increasing number of wastes that in the past were superficially abandoned in landfills, on which pretty mounds strewed with trees were created, but underground there was no question of whether the buried waste continued to release their poisons.

It was later realized that many hazardous wastes continued to live and interact negatively with the environment, so guidelines began on how to insulate landfills from possible leaks of toxic sewage.

Any effort made to “hide” the waste seemed to have been in vain given the continuous growth of waste goods and, therefore, we began to talk about recycling and thermo destruction.

If the road of burning the waste seemed comfortable and “purifying”, it was soon realized that the pollution expressed by a dangerous solid waste did not sublimate with fire, but was only transformed from solid to fumes, going to pollute the air and, cascading with the rains, the soil.

The new generations of incinerators had to be brought in to solve this environmental problem and create renewable electricity in the same way.

Mechanical recycling it was then the only means of recovering and reusing the waste that accumulated, but it took a long time for governments and the population to understand that we had to start with recycling and that the industry needed precise regulations to produce the least possible damage to the ecosystem.

The future of recycling will be achieved by integrating mechanical, chemical processes, aided by renewable energies.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.

Picture: Vernet, Claude Joseph – Seaport by Moonlight – 1771