materiality

Examples of materiality in the following topics:

• Materials Handling

  • Materials handling is the movement, storage, control, and protection of materials during their manufacturing, distribution, consumption, and disposal.
  • Material Handling is the movement, storage, control and protection of materials, goods, and products throughout the process of manufacturing, distribution, consumption, and disposal.
  • The material handling industry manufactures and distributes the equipment and services required to implement material handling systems.
  • Material handling also can consist of sorting and picking, as well as automatic guided vehicles.
  • The material handling system (MHS) is a fundamental part of a flexible manufacturing system, since it interconnects the different processes supplying and taking out raw material, workpieces, sub-products, parts, and final products.

• Typical forms of waste

  • Moving items: needlessly shifting, storing, stacking or filing materials and information, or needlessly moving people, materials and/or information from one point to another.
  • Over-processing: the time and effort spent processing information or material that does not add value to the product (e.g. unnecessary paperwork or employees and managers seeking approvals).
  • Defects: the unnecessary repairing, scrapping or reworking of material or information.

• Recycling and industrial waste

  • The good news is that many of these substances can be reused in applications that require a great deal of material strength.
  • Coal waste (ash, boiler slag, fly ash, flue deposits and desulphurised material) can improve the strength and durability of concrete and manufactured wallboard.
  • Material from construction and demolition sites (including shingles, scrap wood and drywall) can be recycled into asphalt paving, remilled lumber, wallboard and concrete.
  • (EPA, ‘Industrial Materials Recycling: Managing Resources for Tomorrow', RCC Fact Sheet) Even paint and old tyres can be made into high-quality caulks and flooring.

• Recycling

  • Although the word ‘recycling' is a generic term that often includes the reuse or remanufacture of a product or material, for the most part it refers to a process in which used products or packaging are collected, cleaned, shredded, melted down or otherwise reduced to recover their base materials.
  • Virtually anything from building materials to metals to chemicals to paper to plastic to fabrics or food and cloth – and, in some cases, unused medicine – can be recycled.
  • Recycling is more expensive than reuse, repair and remanufacturing because more labour and energy is required to reduce materials back to their original form and then once again reconvert them into a specified intent.
  • That being said, it still makes financial sense to recycle because recycling recaptures the value of raw materials as well as the energy and manpower that went into converting them into products.
  • Making paper from recycled materials uses 70% less energy and produces 73% less air pollution compared with making paper from virgin raw materials.

• Remanufacturing: the basics

  • This is because remanufacturing conserves the original energy, materials, labour and manufacturing effort that exist in every product.
  • Generally speaking, in most manufacturing processes 70% of the cost of producing a product from scratch is needed for materials and 30% pays for labour.
  • Remanufacturing tries to recover the 70% of material costs invested in the original product.
  • How much energy and materials can be exhumed from a remanufactured product?
  • In addition, the amount of raw materials saved would fi ll 155,000 railroad cars and form a train 1,770 kilometres long.

• Building a closed-loop eco-industrial park

  • Most eco-industrial park projects start by estimating the material, water and energy needs of interested businesses.
  • Establishing material, water and energy flows that can be used as raw materials to build sustainable or semi-sustainable closed-loop systems (material flows can include heat, steam, fly ash, sulphur, sludge, gypsum, steam, paper and plastic packaging, metal scrap, wood pallets, machine oil, and so on).
  • Placing companies in close proximity to minimize transportation and material transfer costs.

• Product life extension

  • Reusing products and their materials is a win–win situation for all involved.
  • In many cases, products can be broken down into base materials or components in order to be used again for the same or other applications.

• Reuse, remanufacturing and recycling: an overview

  • The further away from the original product the reclamation process lies, the more the investment in raw materials and other inputs is lost and the greater the costs are to the manufacturer (who has to purchase replacements).
  • Similarly, the wider the base of each closed-loop practice, the more time, effort and expense is involved in collecting and reprocessing reclaimed material:

• It doesn't add up, it multiples

  • On the contrary, sustainable, closed-loop production practices reduce costs, conserve raw materials, help eliminate toxins and hazardous materials (and their expense), and reduce negative impacts on the environment.

• Introduction to Resource Extension Part 1

  • Sometime earlier, he had discovered that in the construction industry, roughly three-quarters of all industrial energy consumption is associated with the extraction and/or production of basic building materials (e.g. steel, wood, glass…).
  • The remaining one-quarter, he observed, is used in the transformation of these materials into buildings.
  • About three times the manpower is used to convert basic materials into buildings than is required in the extraction and production of basic raw materials.
  • The first is to reuse, repair or remanufacture products (including buildings), which facilitates job creation, and ultimately recycles materials and molecules (again, see FIGURE 5-2).
  • The second is to optimize the performance a product provides by converting the product into a service so as to keep its materials in the hands of the manufacturer for as long as possible so they can be reused.