Your Questions About Recycling

The Expert answers:

We are suppose to be taking care of this planet, not trying to destroy it.*

The Expert answers:

R-e-c-y-c-l-e recyle!
C-o-n-s-e-r-v-e conserve!
Don’t pollute the rivers, skys or seas or else you are going to get…
What you deserveeeeeeee

I stole that from Rocko’s Modern Life. Opps.

The Expert answers:

What about phoning your council! THERES MORE QUESTIONS HERE ON RECYCLING THEN GW!

The Expert answers:

Alright…this is one site:
http://www.recyclenow.com/

but you do realise that wikipedia is the best place for anything¬!!!
Good luck!xx

The Expert answers:

Eco mail

Environews

The Expert answers:

I think the greatest advantage to the Earth is that there will be less digging in the ground, and in the case of strip mining there is less of a chance of soil erosion from the removal of trees and ground cover which results in mud slides, loss of top soil, water pollution from the machinery and waste material from the mining.

The Expert answers:

Recycling is good because it can be reused and produce less waste and plastic is very harmful to our planet, so recycling is one of the ways we can help and protect the earth from becoming a waste land. 😉

The Expert answers:

Recycling is the collection of used materials that would otherwise be waste to be broken down and remade into new products. Similarly, reuse is collecting waste such as food and drink containers to be cleaned, refilled and resold. Proponents of recycling say that it prevents waste and reduces the consumption of new raw materials. Commonly recycled materials include glass, paper, aluminum, asphalt, and steel. These materials can be derived either from pre-consumer waste (materials used in manufacturing) or post-consumer waste (materials discarded by the consumer).Many manufactured products are not readily biodegradable and take up space in landfills or must be incinerated. Recycling is an alternative to this. In fact, now there are machines that can recycle waste into energy sources and water. In theory, recycling would allow a continuing reuse of materials for the same purpose. In practice, recycling most often extends the useful life of a material, but in a less-versatile form. For example, when paper is recycled, the fibers shorten, making it less useful for high grade papers. Other materials can suffer from contamination, making them unsuitable for food packaging.

Of the 24 OECD-countries where figures were available, only 16% of household waste was recycled in 2002.

US issues
A neighbourhood recycling station in Oxford, England.
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A neighbourhood recycling station in Oxford, England.

State support for recycling may be more expensive than alternatives such as landfill; recycling efforts in New York City in the USA cost $57 million per year.1 Environmentalists argue that the benefits to society from recycling compensate for any difference in cost.

A number of U.S. States, such as California, Hawaii, Oregon, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Iowa, Michigan and New York have passed laws that establish deposits or refund values on beverage containers in order to promote recycling. Most are five cents per can or bottle. Michigan’s deposit is 10 cents.

Some cities, such as New York and Seattle, have even created laws that enforce fines upon citizens who throw away certain recyclable materials.
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Reuse
The 600ml brown bottle are the “standard beer reused bottle” in Brazil.
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The 600ml brown bottle are the “standard beer reused bottle” in Brazil.

One form of recycling is the reuse of goods, especially bottles. Reuse is distinguished from most forms of recycling, where the good is reduced to a raw material and used in the making of a new good (example: crushing of bottles to make glass for new bottles). Refillable bottles are used extensively in many European countries; for example in Denmark, 98% of bottles are refillable, and 98% of those are returned by consumers. [1] These systems are typically supported by deposit laws and other regulations.

In some developing nations like India and Pakistan, the cost of new bottles often forces manufacturers to collect and refill old glass bottles for selling cola and other drinks. India and Pakistan also have a way of reusing old newspapers: “Kabadiwalas” buy these from the readers for scrap value and reuse them in packaging or in recycling plants. These scrap intermediaries also help in disposing other articles and metals from the consumers and is a lucrative business for the resellers. [citation needed]

In the former East Germany, organic household waste was collected and used as fodder for pigs. This integrated system was made possible by the state’s control of agriculture; the complexities of continuing it in a market economy after German reunification meant the system had to be discontinued. Organic household waste is still collected separately in some towns in Germany, and may be used for fertilizer or landfilled in more sensitive locations where other waste cannot be.

In North America, organic household waste, especially yard waste such as leaves on a seasonal basis, is often collected and heaped up to form compost.
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History
Recycling and rubbish bin in a German railway station.
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Recycling and rubbish bin in a German railway station.

Recycling is generally at its peak during wartime or energy shortages. Massive government promotion campaigns were carried out in World War II in every country involved in the war, urging citizens to conserve metals and fiber. These resource conservation programs established during the war were continued in some natural resource-poor countries, such as Japan, after the war ended.

In the USA, the next big investment in recycling occurred in the 1970s, due to rises in energy costs (recycling aluminum uses only 5% of the energy required by virgin production; glass, paper and metals have less dramatic but very significant energy savings when recycled feedstock is used). The passage of the Clean Water Act in the USA created strong demand for bleached paper (office paper whose fiber has already been bleached white increased in value as water effluent became more expensive).

On September 17, 1981, the first ever blue box recycling program was launched in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Today, more than 90% of Ontario households have access to recycling programs and annually they divert more than 650,000 tonnes (1 tonne = 2,200 pounds) of secondary resource materials. The “blue box” program has expanded in various forms throughout Canada and to countries around the world such as United Kingdom, France and Australia, serving more than 40 million households in countries around the world. Windsor, Ontario uses a red box for paper and cardboard items only while Ottawa, Ontario uses a black box for this purpose.

In 1987, a barge called the Mobro 4000, containing a little over 3,000 tons of garbage departed from Islip, New York to deposit its load of garbage in Morehead City, North Carolina. However, before it reached its destination, rumors that it contained medical waste caused officials at Morehead City to deny the barge permission to unload its garbage. As a result, the barge traveled down the East coast of the United States searching for a place to unload, eventually being denied in Mexico and Belize. The barge finally returned to Islip, where the trash was incinerated after a brief legal battle. The barge’s journey became a small media event. According the Federal Reserve bank of Boston [2], Kelly Ferguson (editor of a pulp and paper industry newsletter) [3], and conservative columnist John Tierney [4], media coverage of the Mobro 4000 led to the false public perception that American landfills were nearly out of space. They say that this perception led to increased public interest in programs to recycle household goods.
A recycling and rubbish bin in a Berlin public-transport station
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A recycling and rubbish bin in a Berlin public-transport station

Another major event that initiated recycling efforts occurred in 1989 when the city of Berkeley, California, banned the use of polystyrene packaging for keeping McDonald’s hamburgers warm. One effect of this ban was to raise the ire of management at Dow Chemical, the world’s largest manufacturer of Polystyrene, which led to the first major efforts to show that plastics can be recycled. By 1999, there were 1,677 companies in the USA alone involved in the post-consumer plastics recycling business.

The Expert answers:

Recycling is the process of turning used products into new products, in an attempt to reduce wastefulness. There are a number of different benefits and advantages to the process, and it’s important to understand the impact on the environment.

Recycling Reduces Waste :

One of the important advantages of recycling is that it helps reduce the waste that goes into landfills. Landfills are a site for waste disposal. Unfortunately, the amount of space in landfills is limited.

Landfills are currently filling up faster than expected. In 2000, nearly one hundred landfills had to close because they were filled to the brim. In fact, some individuals contend that within the next fifty years or so, the majority of landfills will have reached their full capacity.

The waste in the landfills emits dangerous gases when it begins to rot. This is dangerous to both the environment and to individuals that might live near the landfills. The gases that the rotting trash emits pollute the environment.

Recycling reduces that amount of waste that is going into the landfill. For example, according to Earth 911, recycling one ton of plastic will save almost seven and a half cubic yards in landfill space.

While the rate that landfills are filling up is certainly still a problem, recycling is one way that can help reduce that rate. Additionally, by reducing the amount of waste going into the landfills, recycling helps reduce the amount of pollution the landfills are emitting.

Reduced Need for Products to Be Manufactured :

Another benefit tor recycling is that the process reduces the amount of new materials that have to be manufactured. The process of manufacturing usually results in a lot of pollution. Factories usually use carbon dioxide in their manufacturing process.

Carbon dioxide has both contributed to air pollution, and contributed to global warming. Global warming is the defined as an increase in the average temperature of Earth’s near surface air and oceans. This increase is specifically due to human activity, and the carbon dioxide emitted from the factories is one of the activities that alleviate the problem of global warming.

Recycling reduces the need for more and more products to be manufactured.

Recycling Saves Rainforests and Resources :

Currently, the rainforests on the Earth are disappearing. While rainforests at one point covered approximately 14% of the Earth’s surface, Rain Tree.com reports that they now only cover approximately 6% of the Earth’s surface.

There are a number of reasons why rainforests are destroyed. Governments frequently chop down the rainforests to gain profit from the timber in the forests. There are a lot of resources throughout the rainforests that are used to make products such as the rubber in shoes.

Regardless of the reason, the facts are that :

Every second approximately an acre and a half of the rainforests is chopped down.
The rainforests are extremely diverse, and the destruction of them means that the world is losing thousands of unique species, and plant life. For example, more than 50% of the species of plants, animals, and insects on the planet live in the rainforest.
The rainforest helps reduce some of the air pollution that is caused by human activity by recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. The Amazon Rainforest alone is responsible for approximately 20% of the Earth’s oxygen.
Recycling reduces the need for the creation of new products from the rainforest, and the timber from the trees. Recycling newspapers, cardboard, and other types of paper reduces the need for more trees to be cut down to produce new paper.