Your Questions About Recycling

The Expert answers:

Firstly, there is no ‘Japanese’ recycling system. Every area has its own system and this can even vary within a township. So, on the basis of this there are a huge number of variations that can exist. Generally, the minimum separation of trash is burnable / non-burnable / glass / PET bottles / polystyrene / cans. This can be expanded to include different plastics, compostable items, steel, inorganic collection. Different trash has specific days of collection, maybe once a week or once a month.

The Expert answers:

You can find a wealth of information at WWW.HRRA.ORG . The Housatonic Resources Recovery Authority is a regional, governmental, waste management and recycling authority serving eleven municipalities in western Connecticut . You will find recycling pamphlets there and information on the 2010 Earth Day poster contest. They also have information on school recycling programs and other recycling related events.

The Expert answers:

Try planetgreen.com
or treehuggers.com

The Expert answers:

METAL

*Every year we save enough energy recycling steel to supply L.A. With nearly a decade’s worth of electricity.

*We save enough energy by recycling one aluminum can to run a TV set for three hours.

*Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch. That means you can make 20 cans out of recycled material with the same amount of energy it takes to make one can out of new material. Energy savings in 1993 alone were enough to light a city the size of Pittsburgh for six years. .

*Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.

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

* Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.

*Americans throw out enough iron and steel to supply all the nation’s automakers on a continuous basis.

*A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution and mining wastes by about 70%.

** When you toss out one aluminum can you waste as much energy as if you’d filled the same can half-full of gasoline and poured it into the ground.

The Expert answers:

Advantages- Recycling help to limit the amount of glass, paper, and plastic that must be produced. This will end with less garbage in landfills becuase it’s being reused. Disadvantages- Seperate factories must be set up for the recycling of materials, this will just cause more pollution.

Votte me

The Expert answers:

Aluminum Recycling Facts

– 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!
– Used aluminum beverage cans are the most recycled item in the U.S., but other types of aluminum, such as siding, gutters, car components, storm window frames, and lawn furniture can also be recycled.
– Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours — or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
-More aluminum goes into beverage cans than any other product.
– Because so many of them are recycled, aluminum cans account for less than 1% of the total U.S. Waste stream, according to EPA estimates.
– An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now!
– There is no limit to the amount of times an aluminum can be recycled.
– We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda cans every year.
– At one time, aluminum was more valuable than gold!
– A 60-watt light bulb can be run for over a day on the amount of energy saved by recycling 1 pound of steel. In one year in the United States, the recycling of steel saves enough energy to heat and light 18,000,000 homes!

Bundled Newspaper

Paper Recycling Facts

– To produce each week’s Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
-Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
– If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
– If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
– If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you’d get about 700 of them. A busy supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket can go through over 6 million paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are just in the United States!!!
– The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
– The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
– Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
– Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person.
– The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
– In 1993, U.S. Paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.
– Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!
– The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.
– The construction costs of a paper mill designed to use waste paper is 50 to 80% less than the cost of a mill using new pulp.

Recycle Plastic

Plastic Recycling Facts

– Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away!
– Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!
– Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
– Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam coffee cups every year.

Recycle Bottles

Glass Recycling Facts

– Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper. All of these jars are recyclable!
– The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours or a compact fluorescent bulb for 20 hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
– A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose — and even longer if it’s in the landfill.
– Mining and transporting raw materials for glass produces about 385 pounds of waste for every ton of glass that is made. If recycled glass is substituted for half of the raw materials, the waste is cut by more than 80%.

Landfill

Solid Waste and Landfills

– About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material!
– Every year, each American throws out about 1,200 pounds of organic garbage that can be composted.
– The U.S. Is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the world’s people generate 40% of the world’s waste.
– The highest point in Hamilton County, Ohio (near Cincinnati) is “Mount Rumpke.” It is actually a mountain of trash at the Rumpke sanitary landfill towering 1045 ft. Above sea level.
– The US population discards each year 16,000,000,000 diapers, 1,600,000,000 pens, 2,000,000,000

The Expert answers:

Did you know that recycling 10 cans saves 4 pounds of CO2?

Think of how many people drink from a can each day (sodas,snapple,etc.)

it all adds up=)

The Expert answers:

1. Drink your can of crappy soda
2. Stick in the recycling bag
3. Put out for recycling team
4. Buy new can of crappy soda

The Expert answers:

This site[1] says a 100 watt bulb for 4 hours, which is 0.4 kiloWatt hours, or 1.44MJ (MegaJoules… Million Joules).

That amount of energy is equivalent to a 100W bulb for 4 hours, or 1 million Watts for 1.44 seconds, or 1 Watt for 400 hours.

Watts measure power (change in energy / change in time), energy is measured in Joules. As you can see above, using Watts to measure energy doesn’t work. The answer could be 1 Watt or 1 million Watts, but it is always 1.44 million Joules.

1 Joule is the gravitational energy associated with moving about 0.1kg up by 1 metre in the gravitational field of the Earth. So 1.44MJ is the increase in potential energy of 144 tonnes raised by 1 metre.