In some websites, recycling is smeared as a lost cause and of minuscule importance to the environment. Of course, the cliques who question the usefulness of recycling are also the same interests, in general, who gained the most from doing business with unrestrained contempt for the environment. Just what is recycling and how crucial is it to the environment and to all of us? Let's review some important recycling facts, as soon as we are clear about the meaning of recycling.
"Recycling involves processing used materials into new products to prevent waste of potentially useful materials."
Recycling conserves energy and materials by lessening the need for fresh material for the factories. It also helps to preserve the environment by reducing garbage and pollution. It lessens the emission of greenhouse fumes to the atmosphere by reducing the burning of waste and the use of oil for manufacturing and transport.
Recycling facts about plastic
In 1862, plastic was trumpeted as a handy and radical breakthrough at the London World's Fair. Over time, however, our view pertaining to plastic has suffered a drastic change. It is now considered to be a top pollutant thanks to its durability, it takes a very long time to completely biodegrade plastic. The plastic garbage thrown in our landfills or amassed in the earth's oceans, will remain long after our generation is gone.
Envion, a company from Washington D.C., in the U.S., just a few weeks ago bared a new facility that's supposed to turn plastic garbage into fuel. If this is correct, it could prove to be the solution to the world's plastic pollution dilemma. With this technology, it will become rewarding for corporations to mine landfills and the oceans for plastic to feed the industries' hunger for more fuel and energy.
Most of us utilize and discard 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour! Recycling just 26 of these bottles could produce one polyester suit!
Lately, many news outlets and celebrities have been focusing on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It's estimated to be double the size of Texas and holds as much as 100 million tons of plastic debris. Due to the action of the sun and sea water, the plastic in the ocean is splitting into shrapnel-like pieces and are eaten by fish and other sea organisms, which we serve in our dinner tables - the plastic we carelessly threw away has returned through the food chain to haunt us all.
Recycling facts about paper
Thanks to the Digital Age, old-style dailies are now using less paper to print their Sunday editions. As more and more individuals go to the internet to keep abreast with the day's events, old names like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are now impelled to maintain online sites or risk becoming inconsequential.
To print one Sunday version of every news journal in the country, 500 thousand trees needed to be chopped down for their pulp to produce all that paper. In America, 85,000,000 tons of paper are utilized annually - that's like 680 lbs. for every person in this country.
If we reuse just 1 out of 10 of the newspapers we read and scrap afterward, we'd spare 25,000,000 trees annually. The optimum move, cancel all subscriptions NOW or subscribe via RSS only to the internet version of your favorite journal.
Recycling facts about metal
Are you aware of the viral video showing aluminum cans? It's surprising how we squander this useful material by not recycling. The number of aluminum material we discard yearly is said to be large enough to reconstruct all the passenger and frieght aircraft in America 3 times over!
Recycling 1 ton of aluminum is equal to storing energy to power an average American house for ten years! Aluminum containers represent the ideal illustration for what is billed as closed-loop recycling system. This suggests that all used aluminum can may be used to make a brand new container, which can be back in your local supermarket in as short as four weeks - closed-loop, nothing wasted.
Some people declare that recycling at this time is both costly and useless. These people propose that we deposit all garbage in landfills now and bide our time for an innovation to be developed that would make it more systematic and cheaper to mine landfills and drag the oceans for all the piled up waste, and remake these into new products for us. I certainly look forward to that day, but in the meantime, we have to confront waste, lack of materials, greenhouse gases, and inadequate landfills. It's our planet - no one else will defend it, there's just us. Let's recycle today, and educate ourselves about recycling facts in our schools 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.
Disclaimer: All information on this site is provided for informational purposes only! By no means is any
information presented herein intended to substitute for the advice provided to you by any health care or other professional
or organization.
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