Okey dokey

I've actually wondered about this for awhile which makes me think that you have too. I know this looks long (that's what he said) but I promise it's a fairly quick read.

Top Things to Recycle

If you're anything like the people at HowStuffWorks, then odds are good you've already gone through several of these today. You're probably finishing off another one right now. Drawing a blank? I'm talking about the ubiquitous aluminum can. Sometimes touted as a recycling success story, aluminum cans are not only the most frequently recycled product, but also the most profitable and the most energy efficient.

The recycling of aluminum, which is made from bauxite ore, is a closed-loop process, meaning that no new materials are introduced along the way. Aluminum is infinitely recyclable: Cans can be recycled over and over again without degrading. Because of this efficiency, more than two-thirds of all the aluminum ever produced is still in use today [source: Aluminum Now]. So the next time you're feeling lazy and the recycling bin seems so much farther away than the garbage can, you might want to think about the following:

Recycling aluminum prevents the need to mine for ore to create new aluminum. It requires 4 tons of ore to create 1 ton of aluminum.
Recycling aluminum cans takes 95 percent less energy than creating new ones.
The energy it takes to produce one can could produce 20 recycled cans.
The energy saved from recycling one aluminum can could power a 100-watt light bulb for four hours or a television for three hours [sources: Can Manufacturers Institute, Russell].

Not all recyclable products deserve the bragging rights that aluminum does, but some materials come close.

Steel: another recyclable metal made mainly from mined ore, requires 60 percent less energy to recycle than it does to make anew [source: Economist]. Recycling one ton of steel prevents the mining of 2,500 pounds (1,134 kilograms) of iron ore, 1,400 pounds (635 kilograms) of coal and 120 pounds (54 kilograms) of limestone [source: Scottsdale].

Plastic: usually downcycled, meaning it is recycled into something of lesser value like fleece or lumber, but requires 70 percent less energy to recycle than to produce from virgin materials [source: Economist]. And while some people argue that recycling plastic is a lost cause because of its tendency to weaken during reprocessing, manufacturing plastic from new materials requires the messy business of mining for oil and natural gas. Even if plastic can only be recycled once, that's one time that oil and natural gas can be saved.

Glass: recycling glass is 33 percent more energy efficient (and cheaper) than starting fresh and involves no downcycling [source: Economist].

Rethinking Printer Cartridge and Paper Recycling

Ever wonder what happens to your printer cartridges when you leave them at the office supply store or send them away in the mail? You might be surprised to learn that 80 percent of the e-waste that Americans drop off for recycling ends up in Asia. In 2004, the United States exported $3.1 billion worth of scrap to China, where recycling is largely unregulated and labor is cheap [source: Goldstein]. The demand for recyclables in China makes trash the U.S.'s biggest money-making export to the country, exceeding even electronics and airplane parts [source: Goldstein]. Not only does that transport use up a lot of gas, but it also dumps a lot of pollution into the atmosphere.

Countries like the U.S. might be able to justify sending their recyclables to another country if they were efficiently and responsibly recycled, but according to a report by the Basel Action Network, or BAN, those printer cartridges are only desirable because of the traces of ink they still contain. Once the ink is scraped out, the cartridges are either burned or discarded in the river, making the water unfit to drink. The water in the Lianjiang River in China has 200 times the acceptable amount of acid and 2,400 times the acceptable amount of lead [source: Judge].

While sending recyclable ink cartridges to rest in Chinese rivers is not a good idea, the answer to whether to recycle paper is not so obvious. On the one hand, it takes 40 percent less energy to recycle paper than it does to produce it from virgin stock -- half as much when it's newspaper. Recycling paper also prevents it from lying in a landfill [source: Economist]. On the other hand, paper gradually degrades during the recycling process, so it can only be recycled a few times.

Depending on where the paper is being recycled and how tight the controls are, paper recycling may produce up to 5,000 more gallons of contaminated wastewater per ton of paper than making it new [source: Sheffield]. When companies recycle paper, they mix it with water and usually chemicals to remove the ink. The water picks up traces of cadmium and lead, and if it's not reclaimed (or recovered), the chemicals and ink dyes are released into the watershed.

Critics of paper recycling also argue that trees are planted solely for the purpose of harvesting them for paper, so paper is a renewable resource [source: Sheffield]. Others, however, contend that old-growth forests often are cut down to make room for those tree stands [source: Grabianowski]. In the end, whether you think recycling paper or anything else is worthwhile is based on your priorities. Which is more important? Old-growth forests or clean lakes and streams? Keeping waste out of landfills or keeping chemicals out of the water?

Just as all products aren't created equal, all recycling processes aren't created equal either. Not all paper recycling plants emit contaminated water, and not all ink cartridges end up in the Lianjiang River. If you can ensure that your recyclables are going to a reputable facility, then recycle them. Otherwise, if you toss out the occasional ink cartridge or make a few free throws into the wastebasket, you may not need to beat yourself up. But if you've been throwing away all of your aluminum cans, you may want to think twice. For every case of soda or beer you chug and subsequently dump in the trash, you're essentially pouring an entire gallon of gasoline down the drain [source: Russell].


AND IN CASE YOU'RE THINKING:

Is what we're recycling actually getting recycled?

Recyclables are considered a commodity -- a good that can be sold. Those cans, bottles and boxes you recycle can be broken down into raw materials again and sold to manufacturers. And since consumers like products made from recycled materials, manufacturers buy more recycled materials for their products. This means the prices for these commodities increases, which means recycling programs remain feasible.

So recyclables are valuable. Trash, on the other hand, is not. In fact, waste companies are generally charged fees for the right to dump their waste collections at landfills. And really the only difference between trash and recyclables is what happens after they’re picked up. So ultimately, it would be a terrible business model for a waste management company to pick up your recyclables and simply dump them in a landfill.

Sorting Recycled Material

Since your recyclables will eventually be sold to manufacturers, they must meet certain standards. They can’t have too many impurities, since recycled materials compete with virgin materials for use in manufacturing. So the cleaner the materials you return, the more likely it is they will be recycled.

The Minnesota Recycling Program says this means that a pizza box covered in grease and cheese you toss in your recycling bin will end up in a landfill. So, too, will tiny pieces of broken glass, especially when the pieces are different colors (called mixed-glass cullet). And many recycling programs won't take some products that are very difficult to recycle. Chief among them is PVC. This kind of plastic (which can be identified by the 3 inside the recycling symbol these products bear) contains too many additives to be recycled in most cases, since these additives can affect the purity of a batch of recycled plastic.

The remnants of the materials that can’t be recycled is called residual. The less residual a recycling plant allows, the more money it makes, since residual is simply thrown away at a cost to the recycling outfit.

AND

Why the f isn't there more publicity/attention paid to this:

Why is the world's biggest landfill in the Pacific Ocean?

­In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals. Due to its lack of large fish and gentle breezes, fishermen and sailors rarely travel through the gyre. But the area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean.

Ummm, did you just read that?? Give it another looksie.

The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas (WHAT!?!) [source: LA Times]. The Western Garbage Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii. Each swirling mass of refuse is massive and collects trash from all over the world. The patches are connected by a thin 6,000-mile long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Research flights showed that significant amounts of trash also accumulate in the Convergence Zone.

The garbage patches present numerous hazards to marine life, fishing and tourism. But before we discuss those, it's important to look at the role of plastic. Plastic constitutes 90 percent of all trash floating in the world's oceans [source: LA Times]. The United Nations Environment Program estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic [source: UN Environment Program]. In some areas, the amount of plastic outweighs the amount of plankton by a ratio of six to one. Of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the ocean [source: Greenpeace]. Seventy percent of that eventually sinks, damaging life on the ocean floor [source: Greenpeace]. The rest floats; much of it ends up in gyres and the massive garbage patches that form there, with some plastic eventually washing up on a distant shore.

The main problem with plastic -- besides there being so much of it -- is that it doesn't biodegrade. No natural process can break it down. (Experts point out that the durability that makes plastic so useful to humans also makes it quite harmful to nature.) Instead, plastic photodegrades. A plastic cigarette lighter cast out to sea will fragment into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic without breaking into simpler compounds, which scientists estimate could take hundreds of years. The small bits of plastic produced by photodegradation are called mermaid tears or nurdles.

These tiny plastic particles can get sucked up by filter feeders and damage their bodies. Other marine animals eat the plastic, which can poison them or lead to deadly blockages. Nurdles also have the insidious property of soaking up toxic chemicals. Over time, even chemicals or poisons that are widely diffused in water can become highly concentrated as they're mopped up by nurdles. These poison-filled masses threaten the entire food chain, especially when eaten by filter feeders that are then consumed by large creatures.

Alrighty then.