Your Questions About Recycling

The Expert answers:

The compact flourescent bulb will last 60,000 hours.

Aluminum cans are almost 90% recyclable.

Throwing your uneaten food into a compost pile outside can save the landfill from tons of trash. And the compost is good for plants.

Turn your thermostat lower in winter and wear a sweater indoors to save $10 per month and kilowatts of energy use..

The Expert answers:

Hmmmm. This is a good question and I can see that the website you referenced is not giving you the exact answer you’re looking for (good site by the way).

The closest I could get to answering your question is this:

“The aluminium recycling industry recycles all the aluminium scrap it can obtain from end-of-life products and aluminium by-products. The rate at which end-of-life aluminium is recycled varies depending on the product sector, scrap processing technology and on society’s commitment to collect aluminium containing products at end-of-life. Each application sector requires its own recycling solutions and the industry supports initiatives that seek to optimise the recycling rate.”

It’s hard to know the % of all cans because you would literally have to know which companies are utilizing the recycled aluminum.

I look forward to reading more answers!

The Expert answers:

They tell you to remove the cap because if you leave it on, the bottle is full of air and will resist the steel drums that are supposed to crush the recyclables until the plastic bursts, at which point the steel drums would slam together suddenly potentially damaging the drums. They said the same thing about kitchen garbage compressors and even with regular garbage pickup as the garbage truck includes a hydraulic compression plate that can be damaged by the pop bottles bursting. This is also why they tell you to collapse cardboard boxes in both trash and recyclable collection, the boxes are amazingly strong till they collapse and it’s the sudden collapse that can cause damage to the equipment.

There are two forms of modern single stream recycling.

The preferred one is where all items are crushed or rather pressed between two steel drums then chopped at various angles, magnets are used to remove the steel pieces, the rest get dropped through a cross flow airstream so that they get deflected into various bins by their density, this is repeated several times, then then pieces are dropped one by one while lasers measure it’s spectral response to identify the material and puffs of air direct the piece to an appropriate bin, again this is repeated several times, then the sorted pieces are sold off as raw material.

The other method by low cost operators use cheap labour perhaps shipping the recyclables to countries where labour is cheap and people lined up along a conveyor belt specifically look for and grab specific items off the belt and into bins. That is several people will be tasked with pulling soda bottles out and only soda bottles, others are tasked with pulling newsprint out, etc. Only the items that they’ve arranged a buyer for gets pulled out and what’s left goes into the landfill even if it is recyclable.

If your community just goes with a low cost recyclable collection service then chances are the entire stream will be shipped to some far off country, only the most valuable items pulled out and the rest winds up in a landfill in some distant country. It’s well worthwhile to inquire and insist on a better capitalized recycling operation.

Either way, with both single stream methods, you don’t have to sort, or peel off labels or anything. In the mechanized stream, all items are chopped into small pieces and then sorted so the foil lids will wind up in appropriate bins. In the manual stream, the big valuable items like bottles and cans get recycled but the rest winds up in a landfill so the foil lid would just be in a landfill. The labels on cans and glass bottles burn off when the glass, aluminum or steel gets melted.

I would throw anything remotely recyclable into the bin. That way the high tech recycling companies get a significantly better yield than the low tech companies and hence are rewarded for doing a better job.

I do rinse my containers out but mostly to prevent mold from growing before the recyclables get collected. I don’t want a stinky bin in the garage.

The Expert answers:

1. By recycling 1 plastic bottle not only saves anywhere from 100 to 1000 years in the landfill but also saves the environment from the emissions in producing new bottles as well as the oil used to produce that bottle.

2. Approximately 60% of our rubbish thrown away today could be recycled. A survey was done and 9 out of 10 people surveyed said they would recycle more if it was easier

3. Each of us uses approximately one 100-foot-tall Douglas fir tree in paper and wood products per year.

4. More than 56 percent of the paper consumed in the U.S. During 2007 was recovered for recycling — an all-time high. This impressive figure equals nearly 360 pounds of paper for each man, woman, and child in America.

5. Approximately 1.5 million tons of construction products are made each year from paper, including insulation, gypsum wallboard, roofing paper, flooring, padding and sound-absorbing materials.

6. Recycling steel and tin cans saves 74% of the energy used to produce them.

7. Up to 80% of a vehicle can be recycled.

8. On average, 16% of the money you spend on a product pays for the packaging, which ultimately ends up as rubbish.

9. A used aluminum can is recycled and back on the grocery shelf as a new can, in as little as 60 days. That’s closed loop recycling at its finest!

10. If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!

11. Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.

12. A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose — and even longer if it’s in the landfill.

13. About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material!

14. Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute!

15. On average, each one of us produces 4.4 pounds of solid waste each day. This adds up to almost a ton of trash per person, per year.

The Expert answers:

If you have found a reputable, authoritative website but it does not list an author, don’t worry. You can still use it (unless your teacher forbids it).

Use an online citation service such as KnightCite at http://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/index.php. Choose APA under Citation Style. Then under Source Type, click Electronic. Then choose Website Document.

Then simply fill in all available info (author’s name only if it is listed on the website) and click Submit. Then cut and paste the correctly formated citation into your bibliography or works cited page.

Note that you do not have to include an author’s name. Just fill in all the info you have, and it’ll give you the correct APA format, with or without an author.

This comes to you from a school librarian who regularly teaches how to create proper citations for all sorts print and electronic documents.

I just did a quick Google search, simply using the term “recycling.” Almost immediately I found a reputable site the has an article with the author listed. Go to http://www.eoearth.org/article/Recycling to read it. With a bit of effort, you should be able to find plenty of others.

But whatever you do, do not use blogs (as suggested by another person who answered). Unless you research who the blogger is and find that he/she is an well-known expert on the topic of recycling, you cannot trust the blogger’s writings enough to use them as sources for your assignment.

Good luck.

P.S. Learn how to spell “author.” And if you want to write, “the author’s name,” you must include an apostrophe before the ‘s’.

The Expert answers:

Pacific lumber is sure not on my company hitparade

link number two is about how timber industry’s eco
marketing scheme deceives consumers, destroys forests.
(conservation groups expose industry’s misleading “green”
certification & marketing scheme for wood&paper products)

The Expert answers:

I had to do a project like this too, it was a while ago though so I don’t remember much !

– Recycling aluminium uses less energy then mining it. It only uses 5% of the energy which it would take to mine the aluminium.
– Recycling it is cheaper.
– Recycled aluminium is used to make drink cans.
– The source of mined aluminium is bauxite ore.
– Aluminium is 100% recyclable without any loss of its natural qualities.

Its not much, but I hope it helps !

The Expert answers:

23 Percent Of Americans Don’t Recycle

Quick fact: Recycling materials can take as little as 5 percent of the energy you’d wind up expending if you produced them from virgin sources, as is the case with aluminum, which means you not only conserve already-limited resources, but you also curtail potential atmosphere-warming carbon emissions—95 percent, in some cases.

But almost one-quarter of American adults don’t recycle, according to a new Harris Poll. And while you might think the young’uns might be more environmentally progressive, think again. About three in 10 respondents aged 18 to 30 don’t separate their glass, aluminum, and paper from their garbage, compared with 19 percent of seniors aged 62 and older.

The poll also revealed a stark regional division across the U.S. Or A.: East and West coasters were more likely to recycle (88 percent and 86 percent, respectively), while only 67 percent of people living in the South and 70 percent in the Midwest bothered to do so.

Among the anti-recyclers, one in six said they don’t recycle because it wasn’t available in their area; 12 percent, on the other hand, said it takes too much effort, plus it costs more to recycle in their neighborhoods. Another 11 percent said recycling was, well, rubbish and doesn’t make a difference; 6 percent said they were too busy and 5 percent found recycling too difficult. ::Environmental Leader

The Expert answers:

Http://www.p2.org/about/nppr_p2.cfm
http://www.newmoa.org/
http://athropolis.com/links/recycle.htm
http://www.adem.state.al.us/Education%20Div/P2%20Program/P2MainPage.htm
I hope that all of these websites can help you!