In some websites, recycling is belittled as a lost cause and an insignificant factor to the environment. Of course, the circles who impugn the usefulness of recycling are also the same people, in general, who became fat from doing business with blatant contempt for the environment. Just what is recycling and how important is it to the planet and to all of us? Let’s take a look at some important recycling facts, after we define recycling.
“Recycling involves processing used materials into new products to prevent waste of potentially useful materials.”
Recycling saves energy and resources by trimming down the need for raw material for the factories. It also serves to preserve the environment by cutting back on solid waste and pollution. It limits the emission of noxious fumes to the atmosphere by decreasing the burning of waste and the burning of oil for production.
Recycling facts about plastic
In 1862, plastic was toasted as a practical and revolutionary invention at the London World’s Fair. Over the years, however, our view regarding plastic has undergone a acute change. It is now thought of to be a major pollutant thanks to its sturdiness, it requires hundreds of years to effectively decompose plastic. The plastic garbage deposited in our landfills or floating in the planet’s oceans, will be there long after our time is gone.
Envion, a company from Washington D.C., in the United States, recently unveiled a new installation that’s supposed to transform plastic trash into some kind of a fuel base. If this is successful, it could emerge to be the key to solve to the world’s plastic pollution debacle. With this application, it will become advantageous for recyclers to quarry dump sites and the oceans for plastic to meet the factories’ constant requirement for more fuel and energy.
Recycling plastics save double energy compared to burning these in an incinerator.
Are you familiar with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It’s reported to be twice the size of the state of Texas and holds as much as 100 million tons of plastic waste. Due to the action of the sun and sea water, the plastic in this area is breaking down into minute pieces and are eaten by fish and other marine organisms, which we serve in our dinner tables – the plastic we nonchalantly scrapped has come back through the food chain to bedevil us all.
Recycling facts about paper
Dailies like The Chicago Tribune or The Washington Post, or your very own Main Street Gazette are worrying that sales have been progressively going down in the past few years as readers are now obtaining their news online. The paperless Information Age may herald the extinction of our old-style news dailies, but it’s certainly a blessing to the planet.
To come up with a single weekend version of every news journal in the country, 500 thousand trees were chopped down for their pulp to manufacture all that paper. In America, 85,000,000 tons of paper are used every year – that’s equal to 680 lbs. for every person in this country.
If we recycle just one out of ten of the newspapers we buy and discard afterward, we’d spare 25 million trees annually. The optimum solution, stop all subscriptions NOW or subscribe only to the online edition of your top daily.
Recycling facts about metal
Are you aware of the viral film showing aluminum cans? It’s astounding how we squander this useful metal by forgetting to recycle it. The mountain of aluminum containers we landfill yearly is said to be enough to re-manufacture all the passenger and frieght aircraft in this country three times a year!
Reusing 1 ton of aluminum is equal to conserving electricity to power an ordinary US house for 10 years! Aluminum containers are the ideal model for what is labeled as closed-loop recycling system. This means that all used aluminum can may be recycled to make a fresh new can, which you can find in your local supermarket in as short as 4-6 weeks – closed-loop, nothing wasted.
Some people believe that recycling today is both uneconomical and useless. These people propose that we dump all waste material in landfills now and save this for an innovation to be figured out that would make it more efficient and cheaper to mine landfills and trawl the oceans for all the piled up garbage, and remake these into fresh materials for us. I certainly look forward to that day, but in the meantime, we have to tackle waste, lack of materials, greenhouse emissions, and overflowing landfills. It’s our world – no one else will take care of it, there’s just us. Let’s recycle today, and educate ourselves about recycling facts in our libraries and on the internet.
Michael Arms writes about recycling facts and other topics for the Pacebutler Recycling Blog. Pacebutler Corporation is a U.S. cell phone trading company – you may sell, recycle, or donate cell phones to your favorite charity through Pacebutler.
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