Recycling Facts For A Better World

In certain circles, recycling is belittled as a waste of time and a meaningless gesture to the environment. Of course, the circles who challenge the usefulness of recycling are also the same ones, in general, who gained the most from doing business with wanton disdain for the environment. Just what is recycling and how critical is it to the environment and to all of us? Let's consider some important recycling facts, as soon as we define recycling.

"Recycling involves processing used materials into new products to prevent waste of potentially useful materials."

Recycling is unquestionably needed to help support our environment. It helps reduce the discharge of greenhouse gases by lessening the pile of trash incinerated and by lowering petroleum being used to produce raw materials. In fact, it lowers down the necessity for fresh resources as old ones are re-utilized for production.

Recycling facts about plastic

Plastic, an innovation of our present wasteful lifestyle, was hitherto proclaimed as a progressive discovery - it even collected an award in the World's Fair in London in 1862. It's lightweight, ductile, and highly durable. Unluckily, over the years, it is this very durability of plastic that has proven to be an environmental disaster for us. A bit of plastic cast off today takes centuries to break down, it will endure for at least 500 years before total deterioration.

Envion, a company from Washington D.C., in the United States, just the other week bared a new machinery that's claimed to turn plastic trash into a fuel component. If this is successful, it could prove to be the solution to the world's plastic pollution debacle. With this application, it will become lucrative for industrialists to excavate landfills and the oceans for plastic to feed the factories' hunger for more fuel and energy.

As a country, utilize and discard 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour! Recycling just 26 of these bottles could produce one polyester suit!

Lately, a number of news organizations and prominent personalities have been talking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It's said to be twice the size of Texas and contains as much as 100 million tons of plastic trash. Due to the action of the sun and sea water, the plastic in the ocean is splitting into shard-like pieces and are mistaken for food by fish and other marine creatures, which we consume - the plastic we nonchalantly threw away has come back through the food chain to afflict us all.

Recycling facts about paper

Dailies like The Chicago Tribune or The San Francisco Chronicle, or your very own hometown Gazette are complaining that subscriptions have been progressively plummeting down in recent years as the vast majority of people are now sourcing their news from the internet. The paperless Computer Age may herald the disappearance of our printed newspapers, but it's certainly a blessing to the rain forests.

Here's the inconvenient truth about the news journal and swanky magazine you pick up every Sunday: half a million trees we're cut down to make the paper needed for the Sunday edition of all news journals in this country.

If you have a Mac in your house wired to the internet, please stop ALL subscriptions to physical edition of your broadsheet or favorite magazine. If only 10 percent of newspapers bought and trashed in this country is recycled, that's equal to saving 25 million trees yearly.

Recycling facts about metal

Similar to plastic, aluminium is also highly hardy and will persist in the environment for hundreds of years. An aluminum container dumped in a landfill right now will stay there for the next one thousand years! The aluminum cans we throw away every year is enough to remake the entire US commercial air fleet three times over.

Reusing 1 ton of aluminum is equal to conserving electricity to power an ordinary American home for ten years! Aluminum containers represent the superb illustration for what is known as closed-loop recycling system. This suggests that every post-consumer aluminum container may be recycled to manufacture a fresh new container, which can be back in your local grocery in as short as 4-6 weeks - closed-loop, nothing wasted.

There are tons sources of information on recycling facts on the web and at school. You may also ask your town's environment officer to obtain more locale-specific recycling figures. Recycling is in truth a crucial component in our combined resolution to safeguard the environment and make our world a better and marvelous place to live in. Let's recycle.


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.