Discover easy ways to reduce your environmental impact, from food to fashion. With the Environment Bill under review, there's renewed urgency on stemming the flow of plastic waste pouring into our environment. Here's a reminder of why recycling is such a good thing — for you and the planet. Published: 29 Mar 3 min ute read. Conserving natural resources The world's natural resources are finite, and some are in very short supply.
At a fundamental level: Recycling paper and wood saves trees and forests. Yes, you can plant new trees, but you can't replace virgin rainforest or ancient woodlands once they're lost.
Recycling plastic means creating less new plastic , which is definitely a good thing, especially as it's usually made from fossil fuel hydrocarbons.
Recycling metals means there's less need for risky, expensive and damaging mining and extraction of new metal ores. Recycling glass reduces the need to use new raw materials like sand — it sounds hard to believe, but supplies of some types of sand are starting to get low around the world.
Even recycled plastic is still plastic, at the end of the day. Sustainable living tips. Sustainable living. Related stories. Ways to donate. As the waste stream continues to grow, so will the pressures on our landfills, our resources, and our environment. The more we recycle, the less garbage winds up in our landfills and incineration plants. By reusing aluminum, paper, glass, plastics, and other materials, we can save production and energy costs, and reduce the negative impacts that the extraction and processing of virgin materials has on the environment.
It all comes back to you. Recycling gets down to one person taking action. New products can be made from your recyclable waste material. Recycling is good for our environment, our communities, and our economy. Visit America Recycles website at www. A: In a broad sense, recycling is part of an ethic of resource efficiency — of using products to their fullest potential. When a recycled material, rather than a raw material, is used to make a new product, natural resources and energy are conserved.
This is because recycled materials have already been refined and processed once; manufacturing the second time is much cleaner and less energy-intensive than the first.
For example, manufacturing with recycled aluminum cans uses 95 percent less energy than creating the same amount of aluminum with bauxite. Investments in recycling collection support a strong and diverse recycling manufacturing industry, which brings jobs and high wages to states and localities.
The collection of recyclable materials is the first - the most critical link in a chain of economic activity. Investment in local collection infrastructure pays great dividends in supporting significant downstream recycling economic activity. Importantly, many of these recycling manufacturers rely on a steady and consistent supply of recyclable materials generated from recycling programs.
The National Recycling Coalition reports that the recycling industry in California is both diverse and significant. In California, for every job in recycling collection there are eight jobs created through manufacturing the recovered material into a new product. A: It conserves energy, reduces air and water pollution, reduces greenhouse gases, and conserves natural resources.
The results are cleaner air and water, less pollution, more forested land and open space, and reduced greenhouse gases. Everyone knows recycling means less trash going to our landfills but the greatest environmental benefit of recycling is the conservation of energy and natural resources and the prevention of pollution that is generated when a raw material is used to make a new product. The paper, glass, metals, plastic, and organic material Stanford recycled in saved a total of about 70, million BTUs of energy; enough energy to power nearly homes for one year.
Or said another way, conserved 12, barrels of oil or , gallons of gasoline. Producing products using recovered rather than raw materials uses significantly less energy which results in less burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.
By reducing air and water pollution and saving energy, recycling offers an important environmental benefit: it reduces emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons, that contribute to global climate change.
By recycling over tons of paper last year, Stanford saved 32, trees. Stanford reduced the need for tons of iron ore, coal, and limestone by recycling over tons of ferrous scrap metal.
By using recycled materials instead of trees, metal ores, minerals, oil and other raw materials harvested from the earth, recycling-based manufacturing conserves the world's scarce natural resources.
This conservation reduces pressure to expand forests cutting and mining operations. In , Americans generated about million tons of trash and recycled On average, we recycled and composted 1. The state of the economy has a strong impact on consumption and waste generation. Waste generation increases during times of strong economic growth and decreases during times of economic decline.
If you look at the big picture of what it takes to create a product from scratch -- to get the raw materials, transport them, process them and manufacture them -- making goods with recycled material like paper, plastic, glass, and metal is a major energy saver. Actually, there is: Recycling! Check out these 5 reasons why we should all be recycling, every chance we get. According to the EPA, in the U. In California, we manage to keep 44 percent of our trash out of the landfill.
We want to hang onto as much of it as we can for future use. Extracting raw materials from the environment is expensive. It also uses up a lot of water and energy. When we recycle, we extract less, which conserves many of our precious and finite! The more we recycle, the more we protect our resources!
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