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Four Facts About Recycling Plastic

By Chris Norriss

Fact One: In the United States alone, we use over two and a half million plastic bottles every hour. These are not just water bottles, but cleansers, health products and other liquids containers from motor oil and lubricant to milk and juice bottles. Most of these bottles unfortunately end up in the dump.

Fact Two: Plastic garbage bags and those little plastic rings that hold soda cans together can kill an estimated one million sea dwellers every year because so much of our trash is dumped into the ocean. Plastic is light weight so it swims with them and they get caught or suffocate in it. That’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?

Number three: We in the United States all by ourselves toss away over twenty-five billion Styrofoam products every year. This stuff isn’t biodegradable, folks.

Last fact: To end on a positive note, recycling our plastics can uses half as much energy than it takes to burn it. It also reduces the amount of toxic chemicals in the air from incinerating. Due to public awareness, in just nine years between 1990 and 1999, the number of plastic recycling companies grew by 80%. And they are new ones around the world being built every year.

Since the mid-twentieth century, plastic has reigned as the preferred material to use. It is cheap to produce, does not corrode, can be molded into all sorts of shapes and is relatively unbreakable. Today we would find it hard to live without plastic. I dare you to take just five minutes and write down all of the plastic in the room where you are. It can by an eye-opener.

So, yes, recycling plastic is of the utmost importance.

More good news is that it is easier than ever to recycle plastics. Most major metropolitan areas have plastic recycle capabilities. But you must remember to look for the recycle code in the triangle on your plastics and verify what numbers your community recycles. Not all plastics are recyclable. If it does not have a number in a triangle embossed on the bottom, it is not. Many microwavable plastics are not recyclable. You just need to train yourself to look for the “emboss” before you toss. (And of course, rinse them out before you put them in the bin). These numbers are identification codes that lets the recycler know what type of chemicals are in the plastic, how pliable it is, etc. The most common plastics are the termed the PET (such as clear looking soda bottles) and the less see-through MDEP bottles (such as milk and laundry detergent bottles).

Article recommended by Oscar Lama

Five Things to Know About Recycling Waste

By Chris Norriss

Article placed by Carlos Lama

I am sure as a child you heard your mother or grandmother say “Waste not want not.” In this day of environmental concerns and the desire to save energy and money, the saying rings truer than ever.

But first, what is waste recycling? Most commonly used it can stand for Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) and encompasses all of our trash and garbage that is picked up by the trash disposal crews and dumped in land fills or on barges to be sent out to sea. Therefore, everything is waste and a vast majority of it can be recycled if it is set aside and separated.

The second thing to know is that there are methods for utilizing compacted waste as building materials, insulation and packing cushioning. It may sound bizarre, but your banana peel from breakfast just may end up down the road as part of the insulation in someone’s house someday soon.

Thirdly, a form of waste recycling is called source reduction. It is taking the scraps and/or used products and using them again thus reducing the need to produce more new materials. This not only saves a company money and time, it also emits less toxicity into the environment and uses up a lot less energy.

The fourth thing is that not all of our trash ends up in the landfills or on a barge floating out to sea (which always reminded me of sweeping dirt under the rugs- it doesn’t eliminate the problem, just hides it a while and makes it someone else’s job to clean up). There is a relatively new method in the history of recycling called combusting. This does involve the incineration of garbage instead of recycling it, but the energy derived from the combustion process can be harnessed to provide electricity for factories Recently developed emission control methods to keep the toxins from escaping into the air during the combustion process have made this option more and more attractive.

The fifth and final thing is more and more technologies are being discovered to make almost every waste transformed into reusable materials. The technology is resulting in increasingly more non-toxic and environmentally safer methods to handle our MSW. As the world either runs low on natural resources or realizes it is just not economically feasible to use new resources every time the manufacturing of a product is demanded, recycling our everyday waste will become more and more commonplace, create jobs and help preserve our nature for future generations. RecycleAbility will continue to support these efforts. We hope you will as well.