Global Recycling Day | Sustainable Pumping

Global Recycling Day is a UN-backed initiative to promote awareness of recycling – demonstrating its importance, proven principles, and best practices.

At Atlantic Pumps, we spend our days optimising pumps – the beating heart of many recycling processes. Even ‘dry-recyclables’ require pumps – for processes such as washing plastic packaging, separation of materials, and sludge removal. We understand the challenges posed by grit, heavy slurry, and abrasive fluids and build solutions to match.

Recycling: The ‘Seventh Resource’

Most of the earth’s primary resources are considered ‘non-renewable’. While many of them are abundant, we are consuming these resources faster than they can be replenished, making them a finite supply.

Furthermore, some of these resources are less accessible or more energy-intensive to refine, making their recycling crucial.

The Global Recycling Foundation calls recycling the “seventh resource,” as it turns the six finite resources (water, air, oil, natural gas, coal, and minerals) into sustainable, circular resources.

The impact of this resource is staggering. According to the team at Global Recycling Day, “The Seventh Resource (recycled materials) supplies 40% of the world’s raw material needs.” Think about that for a second. Nearly half of everything being manufactured today starts its life as something else. Even more impressively, the same experts note that “The Seventh Resource offsets all CO2 emissions generated by the aviation industry annually.” 

Pumps: Enablers of the Recycling Industry

Whether you are running a glass recycling facility, a plastic sorting and wash plant, or an aggregate recovery site, pumps are the heartbeat of your operation. In the recycling world, water isn’t just a liquid; it’s a transport medium, a catalyst, and a cleaning agent.

Here are three ways pumps keep the recycling industry moving:

Wash-plant Feed Pumps

In aggregate and plastic recycling, materials are often covered in contaminants such as silt, clay, or organic residue. To turn “waste” back into a “resource,” you need high-pressure wash systems. At Atlantic Pumps, we often talk about the importance of sustainable pumping solutions that can handle these challenging environments without constant failure.

Abrasive Sludge Pumps

Recycling processes are tough on rotating equipment like pumps. Moving crushed glass, metal fines, food waste (especially egg shells) or recycled sand is incredibly abrasive. Wear soon leads to increased energy consumption, and standard wastewater pumps get shredded within months, even weeks. When pumps stop, recycling stops.

When pumps and pump parts wear prematurely, it impacts their own carbon-footprint – and your operational costs.

This is where specialised industrial pumps, like the SlurryPro centrifugal, LSM industrial peristaltic, and Toro progressive cavity pumps come into play.  Through optimised design, build quality, and material selection, they stay in the game for longer.

True Sustainability Means Lifetime Energy Efficiency

There’s no point in recycling materials to save the planet if the process itself is wasting energy. One of our core missions is to reduce energy consumption. A pump that is incorrectly sized for a recycling circuit, or wears out quickly, is a “silent thief,” stealing electricity and increasing the carbon footprint of the recycled material. By optimising pump performance, we strengthen the sustainability of the Seventh Resource.

Practical Sustainability

The transition to green energy is creating a huge demand for natural resources. As just one example, the demand for copper over the next 25 years is expected to exceed the amount that humanity has ever mined (in 10,000 years). This outlook was backed up in December 2025 by Shobhan Dhir, International Energy Agency’s critical minerals analyst. Dhir said at the IEA’s annual summit “Copper is heading toward a supply shortage that could reach 30% by 2035”

With new metal ore mines typically taking decades to reach production, this leaves recycling as our only hope of plugging the deficit and meeting our ‘green energy’ targets over the next couple of decades.

Alongside the growth of recycled material, we must not take our eye off energy-efficiency. Every pump system we optimise, every leak will fix, every innovation that saves energy contributes to sustainability.

So, as we celebrate the recycling milestones achieved, let’s use Global Recycling Day to inspire us to do more.

To gain tips and insights into maximising the effective lifetime of your process pumps, reducing the amount of part replacements, and increasing energy efficiency, speak to Atlantic Pumps today.