Your Questions About Recycling

The Expert answers:

Yup.

Glass, Plastic, Steel, Aluminum, Old news papers.

I even go so far as to take old egg cartons and make paper and planters. Then Old paper grocery bags have become brown wrapping paper.

Garbage cardboard boxes from gas stations make great storage on the cheap.

Hell…. I even recycle old junk from broken stuff. I have a dowel rod and two burlap sacks that are now a set of curtains in my living room.

Go to the bathroom, take all the soap slivers. Now put them in a double boiler and melt them down into new soap that can be poured into old jello molds.

I pick up trash on the side of the highway too… I’m not a liberal.

The Expert answers:

1- I don’t use any plastic bags other than for garbage or the bio-degradable litter box liners.
2- walk or bike to nearby destinations.
3- turn your thermostat a couple degrees down in winter and up in summer.
4- use space heaters/AC in the room(s) that you are actually using instead of using a central one for the whole house.
5- recycle your plastics and papers.
6- use toilet paper and paper towels that are made of recycled paper (Scott brand is a good one).
7- try not to use paper towels at all.
8- when grocery shopping, instead of using plastic bags for each one of the fruits and vegetables that you are buying, try to either put similar stuff in one bag (for example you can easily put apples and oranges in one bag and when at the cash register, ask the cashier to take them out of the bag and weight them separately), or don’t use any bags for the things that don’t need one (prepacked fruits and vegetables don’t need to go in another bag and there).
9- if you can, buy your dry foods in bulk (less packaging).

The Expert answers:

– Recycle garbage to reuse and reduce costs of remaking.
– Make a system where stalls are not allowed to give their customers plastic bags unless their customers buy a certain amount of weight.
– Try and use public transport or maybe cycle or walk

The Expert answers:

It depends on where you live — different areas have different guidelines. The best way to find out is to contact your trash collecting company (they probably have a website), and ask them.

But just some guidelines:
-The CD plastic covers, plastic sandwich bags (wash them first!), egg cartons, yogurt containers (also washed), plastic bags, textile materials, juice boxes and aluminum foil (once again, washed) can all be recycled. Depending on your system, you may have to sort them into different bins, but your collecting company should be able to tell you that.
-The egg shells can be composted, so once again, depending on what your trash collection company takes, you may be able to separate this from other trash — but sometimes they don’t, and you either have to put it in with the rest of your trash or find your own composting site.
-As for other food waste, depending on what kind of food it is you either have to throw it in the trash, or compost it (you can find a list here of what you can compost or not: http://www.fundyrecycles.com/index.php?id=29)
-As for the carpet, I don’t really know whether that can be recycled or not, but if you contact the company that collects your trash, they’ll be able to tell you. If the carpet is still in good shape, you could even consider donating it to a charity so that somebody else could use it and it doesn’t go to waste.

I hope that helps, but like I said before, depending on where you are from, the guidelines could be different, so the best thing to do is to get in touch with the company that picks up your trash.

Good luck!

The Expert answers:

I can see you’ve never been to a garbage dump. They do not open the garbage bags and check what’s in the bags. At least they don’t at the garbage dumps I’ve been to. Garbage trucks take only garbage, so the best they can do about stuff that ought to be recycled is to not pick it up at all. The garbage trucks dump out whatever they have in them at the dump. Then the staff at the dump use large machines to plough the garbage into piles, or they use compactors to squash it smaller.

The Expert answers:

I recycle much of my trash but not all that the town says I’m supposed to. I simply do the best that I can.

The Expert answers:

There is a lot more that can be done.

I think the way to go is integration – not separation.

We have a truck that comes once every 2 weeks. We have recycling bins that take glass, plastic bottles only, cans, and a paper bag. Men sort this box by hand into the truck into separate chutes.
It would be easier to have a larger bin, and collect the whole thing – the process of sorting being done on an industrial scale. This way waste streams could be sorted with minimum labour.

I think Government should legislate to introduce UV marker dyes into plastic type feedstock. The products would look the same – but could be sorted automatically by machine under UV light. Eg Pet could be blue, LDPE – green, PVC-red etc. As the dyes are very specific to the frequency of UV – they could just fluoresce under a specific band

The Expert answers:

“Recycling” is a pretty large topic but not quite as vast as your question. We need more information. What grade is the report for? What class is the report for? Is it a written report and if so how long is it to be? If written, do you have more direction like a factual essay, opinion, or research with citations? Is it an oral report and if so, how long is it to be? Is it to be an instructional type of presentation, have props, have hand-outs, and/or should it demonstrate something? Or, is this report to be basically a science report or report of some sort of scientific work you’ve done. Is the specific topic suppose to be about something happening in your community, the US, in a particular industry, or about a particular material?

I’m going to guess that you are feeling somewhat lost about the topic of recycling in general…..Recycling is the use of waste material or items. These are items that would else wise end up “in the garbage”, a landfill, a hazardous waste facility, etc… All too often, we use the word recycling to talk about gathering separated items like collecting plastic bottles in special, recycling bins. Recycling also includes the re-use and/or re-manufacture of those items into something new or different. The gathering plus re-manufacture of items diverted from the waste stream is called “closing the loop”, or in some circles “closed loop recycling”.

The 4R’s are the cornerstones of the current environmental movement: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle, and Re-purpose. To Reduce is use, buy, or make less in the first place. For example, the furniture maker who is able to change the way he cuts a board so that he can get two usable pieces out of each thus reducing the amount of waste material he generates. To Re-use is based in not disposing of an item and instead using it again for the same purpose. Example are: using and refilling a metal water bottle as opposed to using disposable plastic bottles even if they do go to recycling; using cloth as opposed to paper towels and napkins; using re-usable grocery bags rather than disposable plastic ones; originally, these types of things were called “reduce”. But, it also includes washing out a peanut butter or spaghetti sauce jar to re-use for storing other food items; this was more of the original concept of re-use. Recycling is the diverting of waste items from a garbage stream for the purpose of using the materials they are made of for re-manufacturing. A good example is aluminum cans which are sent to recycling and then melted down to make other aluminum items. Re-purposing is similar to re-using but, the item is used for a different purpose than it was originally used for. Often the item is altered, dismantled, or other wise changed too. An example is to take an old can, decorate it, and then Re-purpose it into a pencil holder. Another example is the turning of a removed kitchen cabinet into a dresser by adding a top, some feet, and some paint.- Yes it can be hard to distinguish one from the other and often it is hard to determine if you are reducing, re-using, recycling, or re-purposing.

Today, many people call all of these activities “recycling”. While it is not particularly correct, each of these activities result in fewer resources used and fewer items sent into the garbage stream.

Another term in the world of recycling is the term re-manufacturing. This can happen with virgin materials (materials that have not already been made into something). An example is the use of scrap from one manufacturing process in a different process. Another example is when we use radish leaves in our salad; it is scrap from one cooking process that is used in another. The term re-manufacturing originated with the process of using waste materials (recycled or other wise) to make a whole different product. An example is the making of plastic furniture for use in parks from recycled plastic grocery bags. Another example is bio-desiel made from used deep-fat fryer grease.

The Expert answers:

It depends on the way their processing plant is set up.
They may use a presort that sends bags such as your bottles that have a higher proportion of one material to the section that handles it.
Bulk unsorted bags need to be sorted into the various categories.
The value of the recyclable material is based on the percentage of unwanted contaminates.
So when they can keep all your bottles together until that final sorting they are more efficient.