Your Questions About Recycling

The Expert answers:

My husband and I run our city’s dropoff Recycling Center and are in the process of starting Curbside Recycling in our town, so this question interested me.

I visited the Waste Management website to acquaint myself with their mailable Recycling Kits. Apparently you can recycle, by mail or Fedex, items such as CFL bulbs, batteries, and single-stream (plastic/aluminum/tin/cardboard/etc)https://www.thinkgreenfromhome.com/BottlesCansAndPaper.cfm.

My main objection to this practice would be the expense; for example, $49.95 for the Single Stream Recycling Kit. A box of this dimension would probably not hold more than 2 weeks worth of recyclables for an average family of 3-4 people.

Visit http://earth911.com/ to look for recycling options near you. There may be a center that will accept your recyclables free of charge. Since the centers themselves post the information, always call the centers to make sure their information is current.

You don’t mention why curbside recycling is no longer available, and whether you live in an urban, suburban, or rural area. Sometimes if enough residents contact their elected city officials to express displeasure about discontinuing a service (such as recycling), the elected city officials may consider reinstating the service.

The Expert answers:

Rub a recycling bin all over your face.

The Expert answers:

Recycling is nothing but rehabilitating the use of old and used items by redoing. E.g., plastics. Melt again and cast and reuse.
Similary waste and thrown of materials such as tins and cans also can be recycled by reproducing useful materials from them.
Drain water is treated and recycled for use. Oil from drains of industries are stored and reclailmed and used after mixing up chemcials to get back the qualities required.
In all the cases, either for lesser important uses or for the same use itself can be had, depending upon the qualilty of recycled product. Thus waste othewise thrown out can be recycled, by duly segregating them for a particular recycling use, known as waste management. E.g. Plastics. Papers, steel and ferrous items. Non-ferrous metals, acids, rubber etc. Segregated for recycling.
VR

The Expert answers:

Stop-motion videos are pretty fun. Some people in my dorm did a recycling project where they took the trash from the dorm over the weekend, and sorted out all of the trash from the recycled goods, and built a sculpture with all of the recyclable materials. Building off that idea, what if you made a stop-motion video of all of the recyclable materials sorting themselves out of the trash can, and crawling over to a recycle bin, or doing something else humorous. Just use the video camera to take one frame at a time and move the cans/paper just a tiny bit every frame. It would be funny, entertaining but it would make an impact when people see how much recyclable stuff gets thrown away (especially on the weekends when people dump all their beer)

The Expert answers:

We cannot put in glass! So you need to call them and ask. They also have a website, but if you can find their recycle list on there, congratulations. It took me awhile!!!! Each state or locale will be different.

Basically what we put in is:

aluminium, steel cans, plastic with recycle numbers 1-7 (on the bottom of the container), newspaper, paper such as junk mail/office paper.

We cannot put in garbage, plastic bags or glass.

The Expert answers:

Recycle center is the best option

The Expert answers:

Some where near a Port as you will probably be exporting your metal to China once you have collected 25 tonnes. I would assume you would need a licence, but I don’t know Morocco licensing laws.

You will need to buy equipment to process the scrap, shears, balers etc These can cost many 100’s of thousands of Pounds.

Http://www.just-recycling.com/machinery-for-sale-c144.html

Bright Copper Wire is worth over £5000 per tonne, Aluminium £1000+ China pays very quickly, you should get payment on production of your Bills Of Laden which is about 2 weeks after the ship has left Port on it’s final destination. But you will probably need £250k+ cash to start buying.

I have only skirted round the edge of what you need to do, and I am sure that there will already be Scrap men in Morocco so you will need to do a lot more research. Good luck if you do try it

The Expert answers:

Not always. That’s why you hear the phrase, “Reduce, reuse, recycle” You should be focusing your efforts in that order, as that is the order of least to most resource intensive. Recycling is not the environmental cure-all, but it is usually better than simply disposing of certain wastes.

Most recycling activities would not be undertaken if they were not economically feasible. If recycling aluminum was not economically feasible, you would not get any money for cans. Some recycling activities that are not feasible, but are mandated are items such as used automotive components, like tires and batteries. While there are components that can be recycled, it is costly to recover these materials, making them difficult to be economically viable.

The Expert answers:

Where I live, they actually dump it all out on a warehouse floor and hand-sort it. I was told so by an employee.