Your Questions About Recycling

The Expert answers:

The paper used today is made from almost any type of tree. But go back in time, just 150 years and the paper in the US was made from hemp. It was a political decision to make that plant illegal, so as to increase the yield, and because the political people in charge at the time owned vast areas of American woodland. The whole idea was, if there is no other source of paper, then they would get immensely rich.
Although there are tree farms that produce the material for making paper, much is also gained from unfarmed woodland.
The rain forests are being cut down. Although the main reasons for the claiming of this land are for farming and lumber usage, there is still a lot which goes towards the production of paper.
Paper can be recycled, although if not mixed with a certain percentage of new wood, it is of a poor quality. Each time that we recycle paper, we are reducing the amount of new trees that need to be cut down for paper use.
The costs of transporting newly felled timber is quite high, so recycling paper, can and does, reduce fuel usage and eases road congestion.
To help alleviate the need for cutting trees for paper, we could, very easily, revert to the old method of paper production.

The Expert answers:

America is nothing like Switzerland. Having been there last year I have some knowledge of this. Getting around in most town means that you must have a car. Since everything is so spread out here. And public transportation is almost non existence. And most people are too lazy to recycle. I recycle glass, paper, oil, and veggies in my compost pile. Its too hard to find a place that recycles pet. I have some twisty bulbs but most of my fixtures won’t take them. I admit that I don’t recycle everything that I could. I am also saddened by the fact of how lazy people are and how they just don’t care about their trash. Almost every day I have to pick trash out of my yard that my neighbors of passerby just throw out their windows with no regards to wildlife of people. I even went to the park the other day and saw lots of trash lying around in the lake and on the land. It would be great if everyone could do their part to make this world cleaner.

The Expert answers:

Fantastic Plastic Facts

* Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W bulb for up to 6 hours.
* 9.1 billion plastic bottles were disposed of in 2002 with only 360 million of them being recycled.
* In Britain we use about 275,000 tonnes of plastic bottles in our homes every year- that’s about 15 million bottles every day.
* It takes about 450 years just for one plastic bottle to break down in the ground!
* An average 323 plastic bags are taken into our homes every year and it takes 500 years to decay when sent to landfill.
* It takes about 25 recycled plastic drinks bottles to make one fleece jacket.
* Only 2.5% of plastic bottles are presently recycled in Europe.

The Expert answers:

Try the national campaign to encourage recycling website at the link below.

Recycling Facts & Figures
In 1999, recycling and composting activities prevented about 64 million tons of material from ending up in landfills and incinerators. Today, this country recycles 32 percent of its waste, a rate that has almost doubled during the past 15 years.
While recycling has grown in general, recycling of specific materials has grown even more drastically: 50 percent of all paper, 34 percent of all plastic soft drink bottles, 45 percent of all aluminum beer and soft drink cans, 63 percent of all steel packaging, and 67 percent of all major appliances are now recycled.
Twenty years ago, only one curbside recycling program existed in the United States, which collected several materials at the curb. By 2005, almost 9,000 curbside programs had sprouted up across the nation. As of 2005, about 500 materials recovery facilities had been established to process the collected materials.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Aluminum Can Recycling
Benefits of Aluminum Can Recycling
Facts about Aluminum Recycling
Cans For Habitat
History of Aluminum Cans
How Are Aluminum Cans Made?
How Is An Aluminum Can Recycled?
Helpful Resources and Links
Battery Recycling
Curbside Recycling
About Curbside Recycling
Curbside Recycling Fun Facts
The Costs of Curbside Recycling
Used Motor Oil & Filter Recycling
How To Change and Recycle Your Oil Filter
How to Collect and Recycle Your Motor Oil
Paint Recycling
Paint Wise—Buy The Right Size
Use It All Up—Leave No Trace of Your Leftover Paint
Reuse or Recycle It—Give Your Old Paint New Life
Store It Properly—Extend the Life of Your Leftover Paint
Disposal of Paint—The Last Resort
Helpful Links on Paint Recycling
Cell Phone Recycling
Computer Recycling & Reuse
How to Start a Recycling Program
Paper Recycling
Why is it Important to Recycle Paper?
How is Paper Recycled?
The Facts About Paper and Paper Recycling
What Can be Made From the Different Collected Paper Products?
Close The Loop – Buy Recycled!
What is Paper and How is it Made?
The History of Paper
Paper Recycling at School
Paper Recycling In My Community
Paper Recycling at Work
Paper Recycling Education Resources
AF&PA Paper Recycling Awards
Helpful Links
Identifying Recycled Content Products
Plastic Bottle Recycling
Plastic Bottle Recycling Facts
Explaining the Bottle Bill
Can & Bottle Container Disposal Counter

The Expert answers:

Http://www3.niu.edu/recycling/alum_facts/page4.html

http://www.southlakelandrecycling.co.uk/fan_plastic_facts.html

http://australianmuseum.net.au/blogpost/Science/Interesting-plastic-facts

Hope this helps 🙂

The Expert answers:

Hello. I am a environmentalist and have conducted a few recycling activities with schools and communities. Below are some of the facts that I use to encourage people to recycle:

How long does it take to biodegrade?
ItemTime to break down
Cotton1 to 5 months
Paper2 to 5 months
Rope3 to 14 years
Orange peel6 months
Cigarette butts1 to 12 years
Plastic bags10 to 20 years
Leather shoes25 to 40 years
Tin cans50 to 100 years
Aluminium cans80 to 100 years
Glass bottles1 million years
Plastic bottlesForever

You can see that if we just place things in a landfil site then the rubbish just keeps getting larger and larger – we need to reduce our waste and recycle.

Reuse
Always mend items rather than throw them out. In many places we are becoming more of a ‘throw away society’ because many things today are designed for one time use only, such as tin cans and glass bottles and if something breaks we buy a new one. We should try to reuse as many things as possible and increase their lifespan, rather than throwing them out immediately!

Reduce
If you have a choice, try to buy things with less packaging. For example, you may want to buy some fruit at your local grocery store, some of them may be covered in plastic or placed on a tray and others may be loose. Buy the ones that are loose as this reduces the amount of packaging. Also, always try to buy things in larger sizes as this reduces the amount of packaging you will collect.

Refuse
How many plastic bags did you collect yesterday? Did you collect 5, 10 or 15 bags? Let’s say you collected 10 bags…so on average you collect 70 bags a week – do you know that’s about 3,650 bags a year! And that’s just you! How many does your family or community collect? Go on – work it out!

So, simply by refusing a plastic bag when you are offered one can help enormously. How about using a cloth bag to go shopping with? When you go to buy your fruit and vegetables just ask the shopkeeper to place them straight into your cloth bag! You can say no when a shop vendor tries to put just one or two items into a plastic bag. If it is only a small item you can put it in your pocket! If you have plastic bags at home why don’t you reuse them when you go shopping? Just grab a few bags and put all of your goods in there.

Compost
Compost is kitchen waste such as vegetable and fruit peel, leftover food scraps and garden waste such as leaves and branches that are left to properly decompose and turn into compost. It creates a cleaner environment as it means food and garden scraps will not be thrown out onto the streets to decay. Compost is great for growing vegetables and fruit.

Interesting facts to talk about…
·You can use these interesting facts to surprise the your school mates….

By recycling 1 ton of paper you save:
• 17 trees
• 6,953 gallons of water
• 463 gallons of oil
• 587 pounds of air pollution
• 3.06 cubic yards of landfill space
• 4,077-kilowatt hours of energy

·Recycling 1 aluminium can save enough energy to run a TV for three hours – or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.

·One three-foot stack of newspapers is equal to one tree, approximately 30 feet tall
·One three-foot stack of newspaper weighs 100 pounds
·To make one ton of virgin paper uses 17 trees (3 2/3 acres of forest)
·Recycling one aluminium can saves the energy equivalent to one cup of gasoline
·32% of all waste is from packaging
·Plastic bags and other plastic rubbish thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year

You asked about negative points too. I would have to say that recycling can use alot of energy – more sometimes than making a brand new item. So that is a drawback. Also, and one of the main points I think, is that if we are told that to recycle will solve our problems, then we are not really looking at the underlying problem. That is – we all consume too much and produce far too much waste. We should be changing the way we live and use things. We should REDUCE and REUSE and then recycle as a last option. You could try and encourage your school friends to reduce the amount of waste – for example, buying things with less packaging and saying no to plastic bags in shops.

I live and work in the developing world and solid waste is such a big problem here – people burn it on the streets which releases a nasty toxin called dioxin. This can cause cancer. They sling it into the river which causes pollution, or it just lies around the city decaying and looking ugly.

So – hope this information helps – good luck with encouraging your school to recycle – try to make it easy for them by placing recycle bins in many places and by telling people what they can and can’t put in them…..

Thanks

The Expert answers:

As mentioned by the other respondents, there are lots of good reasons to recycle, but another element, that we don’t seem to emphasize as much, is the importance of buying recycled items whenever there is that option. I always buy toilet paper and paper towels made from post-consumer recycled paper – Sure it is not as soft as “cashmere” but I just can’t justify cutting down trees to wipe my deriere.

Another factor to consider is the choice of packaging to begin with. Consider carbonated beverage containers: Plastic is recyclable but is made from petroleum products – I don’t know all the chemistry involved, but I would suspect that there are byproducts released both during their manufacture and when they are recycled into other plastic products. Glass is essentially made from non-toxic and abundant sand, but it is very heavy (adding to the amount of fuel required to transport the bottles) and requires a lot of energy (heat) to make and to recycle. Aluminum cans are light, and theoretically can be recycled many, many times without diminishing in quality, but he initial extraction of aluminum involves mining and potentially harmful chemicals too. -A lot to consider when purchasing soda!

The best we can do is learn as much as we can about the way packaging is made and recycled, minimize our consumption of packaging in the first place, and choose products that are recycled or in recycled packaging in order to support recycling initiatives.

The Expert answers:

There are no such things as vampires.

1. Vampires, defined as a humanoid that MUST consume blood or energy to survive do not exist. Cut and paste time, as it is too much work to type this out over and over and I “recycle” my own answers instead of retyping them.

2. The human body is not designed to process blood for nutrition. There is not enough protein, carbohydrates, and fats present in blood to maintain a complex creature such as Homo Sapiens or any theorized offshoot mutations. When a human ingests food it is broken up into a bolus by chewing, then churned up in the stomach with digestive juices to form a mass called chyme. It then passes through the pylorus into the duodenum, part of the small intestine where it mixes with bile salts and secretions from the pancreas and liver which continue breaking it down on a molecular basis. The broken down nutrients pass through the wall of the intestines and into the bloodstream where they are carried to each cell or stored for later use. Indigestible bulk continues through the intestines, turning a dark brown from the bile.

3. A person physically unable to process his own food for nutrition therefore also could not process blood – it’s the same process. Ingested blood does not transmit directly to the veins anyway – it would be chemically broken down by the digestive system.

4. Theoretical ingestion of blood to supply these nutrients would therefore have to occur at least once a day, and would require the ingestion of the entire blood supply which could not happen as the stomach is far too small to hold that much liquid volume. Hold up your clenched fist – under normal conditions your stomach is about that size. Furthermore, such a mass would be difficult to pass thru the intestines as it has no fibrous bulk, would create an intestinal impaction, causing massive vomiting from the large concentration of iron present, and any “real” vampire would have to eventually expel the waste, which would come out as a black, tarry, smelly goo, just as stool does when blood is present from a upper GI bleed.

5. Even if a vampire feeds once a week, and his victim also becomes a vampire, that is exponential growth, with 4 iterations a month. 1st iteration: 1 makes 1, total 2. 2nd iteration: 2 make 2, total 4. 3rd iteration: 4 make 4, total 8. 4th iteration: 8 make 8, total 16. 16 vampires at the end of 1 month, 256 at the end of the 2nd month, 4096 by the end of the 3rd month, 65,536 by the end of the 4th month, 1,048,476 at the end of the 5th, and 33,572,832 vampires at the end of half a year! Do the math – vampires are a mathematical impossibility.

6.The humans who profess to be vampires are victims of an all-encompassing self induced delusion. They are as human as you or I, regardless of their claims. Note that there is absolutely no scientific or medical proof that these people derive any benefit at all from the ingestion of blood, and even worse are the so-called “psychic” vampires, because their delusion is one that they cannot substantiate with any concrete evidence at all.

7. There is no “vampire” gene. People are not “born” as vampires. When a woman goes to the hospital for prenatal care there are many tests done on mother and child, even while still in the womb, to check for many things, including genetic anomalies that result in deformities and birth defects. If such a gene existed, in today’s world with today’s technology it would have been found – we have already completely sequenced the human genome. It would also have to follow Mendel’s law of dominant/recessive gene theory. Again, the odds on that many “vampires” all escaping the notice of the medical/scientific community are so low as to be almost nonexistent. The idea that there is a global “vampire community” engaging in controlled breeding to keep the “bloodline pure” is delusional in the extreme.

The Expert answers:

Http://www.recycling-revolution.com/recycling-benefits.html

http://www.environment-green.com/