Category: Recycling News

Are plastic bags worse than paper bags?

Though commonly debated, many are surprised to find out that compared to paper, plastic grocery bags can be a resource-efficient choice. Plastic grocery bags require 70 percent less energy to manufacture than paper bags. And produce half the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the process, according to the Plastics Industry.

Though efficient to produce, it is crucial that plastic bags be reused and recycled. Plastic bags don’t biodegrade quickly and can cause problems for wildlife when disposed of improperly.

Where can I recycle plastic bags?

Most grocers and large retailers such as Target and Walmart now accept plastic bags, wrap and film for recycling. Look for a bin near the front of the store or check for local recycling options nearest you.

Are plastic bags made from oil?

About 85 percent of plastic bags used in the United States are American-made and come from natural gas, not foreign oil, according to PlasticBagFacts.org. According to the Plastics Industry, less than .05% of a barrel of oil goes into making all of the plastic bags used in the US.

SOURCE:  http://earth911.com/recycling-guide/how-to-recycle-plastic-bags/

Recycling is crucial to running a green home. It’s also an easy and effective way to reduce your weekly contribution to the local landfill.

Unfortunately, many people either aren’t recycling as much as they could be, or are recycling the wrong way. A main reason for this is lack of access to accurate information.

Even if you know the basics, you may have lingering questions. Covanta, a world leader and expert in sustainable waste management and renewable energy, offers helpful insights into common recycling questions:

• What cardboard is recyclable? All cardboard boxes except waxed can be recycled. In some communities, cardboard includes cereal, pasta or other food boxes. If possible, remove adhesive labels and tape prior to placing it in the recycling bin, as glue can interfere with the pulping process. Recycle the non-greasy portion of pizza boxes and discard the rest with the trash.
  • Is wet newspaper recyclable? Paper fibers can only hold so much moisture. If wet paper arrives at the recycling facility, it may not absorb the chemicals needed to process the paper fibers into new products. Try to keep recycle-ready paper indoors until pick-up day.
  • Should you remove plastic bottle caps and wine corks? Corks should be reused or thrown in the trash. Remove plastic caps so you can crush the plastic bottles, making it easy to fit more into the bin. Some caps are recyclable, but recycling centers often discard non-recyclable caps as trash.
  • Can you recycle items that contained chemicals? Yes, as long as they’re completely empty. An exception is motor oil, because residual oil can interfere with plastics recycling.
  • Is crushing cans necessary? It’s not necessary to crush cans in preparation for recycling, but doing so makes room in your recycling bin and the transport truck, which means fewer trips to the recycling facility.
  • How do you recycle batteries and electronics? Many municipalities are now recycling electronics. And some department stores, such as Best Buy, have take-back programs. Visit www.Call2Recycle.org to find your nearest battery take-back location.
  • Where do recyclables go? After a pick-up, recyclables go to an interim processor called a Materials Recovery Facility. There, they are sorted by machine and by hand using a conveyor belt. Separated recyclables are sent to a processing plant to be made into new products.
  • Why recycle? Recycling preserves natural resources and is good for the economy, accounting for about one million manufacturing jobs nationwide, and generating more than $100 billion in revenue, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
  • What happens to waste that’s not recycled? While some materials may be sent to landfills, the preferred option is an Energy-from-Waste facility, which offers a safe, technologically advanced means of waste disposal that generates clean, renewable energy, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and recycles metal left over in household waste.

Environmental stewardship starts at home. We must all take steps to educate ourselves on recycling.

Source:  StatePoint Special to the Courier
http://www.bccourier.com/Archives/Community_detail.php?contentId=14868
Photo by Kasia Bialasiewicz

Due to the ever-increasing demand of metals and due to the ever decreasing supply, scrap metal recycling has become necessary. Let us understand how to recycle metal and what are its benefits.

Recycling is processing of used materials into new products, which can be used again. For example, we use recycled paper, recycled plastic, recycled glass and many more. Recycling helps us in many ways – conserves limited and exhaustible resources, saves energy, is environmental friendly, creates jobs and helps in proper waste disposal. There are many other benefits too and so we recycle food scrapes, leather, rubber, wood in addition to those mentioned above. Metal scrap is also added to this long list as the resources of metals are depleting at an alarming rate. Recycle scrap metal constitutes about 8% of the total materials recycled. Let us look into scrap metal recycling in detail.

Due to the ever-increasing demands of the human race and the ever decreasing sources of metals, recycling has become of prime importance. Not only this, but the environmental pollution, the greenhouse effect and the effects of carbon footprint has necessitated that we concentrate on the recycling of different products. Continue reading “Scrap Metal Recycling”

Originally published on October 14, 2015 4:17 pm

Is recycling good for the environment? Well of course, but maybe not the way we do it. John Tierney argued in The New York Times that much of our current recycling, while well-intentioned, is wrongheaded, costly and in some cases may be doing more harm than good.

Bucknell University economist Thomas Kinnaman similarly wants America to rethink recycling. He says some materials – like tin cans and aluminum – are very hard to make using virgin materials and it’s best to recycle them.

But for others, like glass and plastic, if you take into account the cost of hauling the recycling to recycling centers (which can sometimes be further away than landfills), and how easy it is to make plastic and glass from virgin materials, it may not make sense to recycle them as much as we are now.

Here & Now‘s Robin Young speaks with Kinnaman about his vision for how the U.S. should be recycling.

Interview Highlights: Thomas Kinnaman
On findings that recycling is not as beneficial as once believed

“It surprised me as well. So once we consider the full effects of recycling to both the economy and the environment, it does look like some of the benefits associated with recycling are not as strong as we once thought. You know, every time you make a decision as a household whether to recycle a bottle or to throw it out, you are entering a life cycle. So there’s a life cycle associated with the recycling process and there’s a separate life cycle that’s associated with the landfill or disposing process. And so you have to list all of the environmental and economic consequences of entering each life cycle. So for recycling, it does take energy to collect that material, to process it, to transport it to recycling facilities, and then to finally put it back into production. And the benefit we’re seeing from that is that for some materials, the ability to use those recycled materials offset the need to use virgin or raw materials for the same production processes. So that turns out to be a great benefit for some materials, but for others it doesn’t.”

What items are not as cost beneficial to recycle and which are beneficial?

“OK, so the really beneficial things to recycle are aluminum cans or any forms of aluminum that you have around the house that you’re considering to dispose. The environmental costs to mine new alumina and bauxite to produce new aluminum from scratch are fairly substantial, so anything we can do to maximize our recycling of aluminum turns out to be a win-win. Bimetal tin cans – these are the soup cans, the vegetable cans that we buy some of our food with – those also have a very, very positive life cycle signature, and again, we want to refocus policy to recycle more of these things than we currently are. Some of the other materials – and actually, by the way, paper as well has a very positive life cycle signature mainly, again, because it’s difficult and arduous to produce paper from scratch. Glass bottles, plastic bottles, other forms of plastic – a lot of us want to recycle those things. I think the environment and the economy would rather that we didn’t.”

Why is it not as economical to recycle plastic and glass?

“Well, first of all, it’s fairly comparatively easy to make plastic and glass from scratch. So it doesn’t have as much of an energy requirement, as much as an environmental impact. Secondly, I know plastic itself per bottle, they take up a lot of space. You can try to smash them up, but it’s relatively more expensive to take a ton of plastic somewhere to get it recycled. So the transportation costs, both the economic and environmental costs associated with the transportation of plastic tend to be higher than for other materials on a per ton basis because they’re not very dense in terms of weight.”

On landfills now being built in ways that make them more valuable

Glass bottles, plastic bottles, other forms of plastic – a lot of us want to recycle those things. I think the environment and the economy would rather that we didn’t.

“A lot of this, these advances in landfills, have happened primarily in the United States and primarily in response to both federal and state legislation that require very strict standards on how you build a landfill and how you manage and operate that landfill. They still present a problem to neighborhoods. Nobody wants to live next to a landfill. Economic data and models are very clear that being located within two miles of a landfill does reduce the value of your properties. So these things are not environmentally great, but you just compare in the margin using a landfill relative to putting plastic through a very energy-intensive process to recycle, then in terms of a carbon footprint, it comes very close and it may actually, in some cases, be beneficial to recycle that. Modern landfills require very thick linings of clay or impermeable plastics. When they are constructed, they have imbedded in them special grids to allow all methane and all leachate to be collected and treated. In the case of methane, it’s increasingly being used to produce electricity, which can offset the production cost of electricity by using coal or other fossil fuels. And again, a good life cycle model will account for all of these things, and the life cycle models are looking more favorably on landfilling and incineration then they were 25 years ago.”

On changing the way people view recycling

“Recycling and the culture that surrounded it, I think a lot of people and advocates of recycling thought of it as sort of a gateway behavior in that once you began recycling it would open up a whole flurry of other environmentally responsible activities that we could pursue. We might start riding our bike or walking more than driving our car. And, you know, I think other experts could talk about this as well, but it just doesn’t seem to have worked that way. I think in some cases, you could almost characterize recycling as a way of atoning for all of our environmental sins, if you will, and as long as we’re recycling, then we feel better about ourselves and then we can go ahead and drive our big car, and go ahead and keep our lights on and keep our thermostat high, and it’s almost being viewed as a substitute for other forms of environmental responsible behavior.”

GuestThomas Kinnaman, cChair of the Department of Economics at Bucknell University.
Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Garbage is an unlikely topic for a terrific coffee-table book, but the authors and publisher have come close with “Make Garbage Great:  The TerraCycle Family Guide to a Zero-Waste Lifestyle.”

TerraCycle is a young company devoted to innovative recycling services as well as “upcycling,” an optimistic notion which holds that there’s a value-added world beyond the pyramid of reduce-reuse-recycle – that our everyday discards can be transformed into something betterthan the original item grown obsolete.

One provocative example: TerraCycle turns cigarette filters into plastic pellets that can be used in the manufacture of durable plastic goods, like park benches and shipping pallets (with the paper and tobacco scraps being composted, of course).

Another: making Target’s plastic shopping bags into those reTotes you may remember but which TerraCycle might just as soon forget, as the project lost a lot of money for a company that was coming to be known as “the Google of garbage.”

So I was eager to peruse the book’s selection of “more than 100 recycling tips and do-it-yourself projects.”

My emphasis added there and, as it turns out, in the wrong part of the subtitle, because the tips outweigh the projects by four to one.

But if you’re the sort of DIY-er drawn to fashioning a wallet out of a bicycle inner tube, or a garden planter out of eggshells, these 20-odd projects – some of them very odd indeed – may be enough. They might even stir you to better ideas of your own.

Quite a few look to be home-built versions of products TerraCycle has developed for mass production, like the coin purse made out of a drink pouch, or the tote also made out of drink pouches, which I guess are more durable than I realized. TerraCycle has even turned them into upholstery.

More durability than we need

Needless durability is of course is the biggest problem with modern garbage, as author and TerraCycle execs Tom Szaky and Albe Zakes explain in fascinating depth. So much of it lasts so long, and keeps piling up, and until we change our way of thinking about this problem it isn’t going to get any smaller.

But most of us don’t think about it at all, or not very often, even if we’re among those who contribute to the problem on an industrial scale.

Jerry Greenfield, a co-founder of the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream outfit, provided a foreword to “Make Garbage Great.” Though his company stressed environmental values and social responsibility in making its products, he writes, there were some blind spots about waste:

I knew that in the production of ice cream, in the manufacture of its packaging, and in the countless plastic and wooden spoons we distributed, a lot of additional waste was generated …. I thought of all of these impacts as necessary, even when operating in the most thoughtful way possible.

My perspective changed once I read an advance copy of Make Garbage Great. … What is wonderful is that the format allows the content to be savored in small doses; it allows us to not only learn about waste but also how to purchase, reuse, and discard differently, all the while entertaining.

The story of plastics

The book defines garbage as “anything you’re willing to pay to get rid of,” which is a provocative construct on its own, when you think about it, because why acquire it in the first place?

Dividing the ever-growing torrent into eight distinct streams – plastics, metals, paper, textiles, glass, wood, rubber and organics – the book traces their histories and assesses their problematic present. From the plastics section:

• Polystyrene was invented, or discovered, by accident in 1839 by a British chemist trying to distill sap from a rubber tree. The first truly synthetic plastic came along in 1856, when another British chemist, Alexander Parkes, tried to make a substitute for ivory; his “Parkesine” went nowhere until 1870, when the American inventor John Wesley Hyatt bought Parkes’ patent and introduced the world, ta-da, to celluloid.
• By 1979 world plastics production surpassed steel production, thanks to such materials and products as polyvinyl chloride (1872), PET (1941), Tupperware (1946), and Saran Wrap (1953),  the last product repurposing a film that the authors say (without attribution or, alas, elaboration)  was “used by the army to help ventilate combat boots.”
• “Between 1960 and 2000, Americans alone went from generating around 400,000 tons of plastic in the municipal solid waste stream (what consumers throw in the trash) to 24.7 million tons. … In 2011, that number skyrocketed again to 32 million tons, only 8 percent of which was recycled.”
• “It’s a misconception that there are unrecyclable plastics. Everything is recyclable; it’s just a matter of finding someone willing to pay to do it.”
• Indeed, “an alternative energy company called Ágilyx has developed technology capable of actually repurposing plastic trash back into crude oil.” But there’s no market for this in a world awash in new crude.

And that brings me to one of three serious shortcomings in “Make Garbage Great”: no footnotes, no references, no bibliography and, nearly as vexing, no index. You’re on your own to find out more about Ágilyx, or to return to this brief reference if you move on without marking your place.

A second weakness is a selection of upcycling examples that are occasionally inspiring – like the technique developed by Carnegie Mellon students, organized as Engineers Without Borders, to flatten plastic beverage bottles and turn them into cheap, durable, oddly beautiful roofing for poor countries – but more often kind of dopey.

Jerry Greenfield says he loves the bird feeder made by cutting holes in a large beverage bottle and sticking plastic spoons through the sides to make perches. But I bet he hasn’t made one for his own place. (Me, if it was hanging from one of my trees, I’d hope for a windstorm.)

Political solutions needed, too

A matter of taste, perhaps, but I think better examples of here-and-now possibility on a large scale will be needed to inspire new attitudes toward the flood of unrecycled plastics exhausting our landfills, killing our wildlife and forming massive trash gyres in our oceans.

Which leads me to the book’s third shortcoming.

Szaky and Zakes note that some localities are banning styrofoam and microbeads, two of the five plastic products they say a thoughtful consumer ought never buy; the others are bottled water, disposable dishware and products containing PVC.

But you can look in vain for discussion of how these political successes were won and how they might be replicated, especially with products less trivial in daily life than a styrofoam cup. Getting PVC out of stuff like shower curtains, pencil cases and other trinkets is a no-brainer; plumbing pipe and fittings would seem a different kind of challenge.

If you come to this book out of an interest in knowing more about garbage, you’ll be amply rewarded. If you’re seeking a zero-waste lifestyle plan, which the cover seems to offer, you’ll have to assemble it yourself from ideas gathered here and there, and it will take some patience.

I’m guessing you already take your own bags to the grocery and pack your picnic basket with real plates, glasses and silverware. You’re already avoiding disposable products where possible and recycling everything you can think of among the remains.

But that’s not enough, and we all know it’s not enough, and though it’s certainly true that every little bit helps at least a little, making serious progress is going to require more than getting people to sew eyeglass cases out of old blue-jeans pockets, fold foil chip bags into origami napkin rings (how many of those do you need?), or build their own room dividers out of 185 CDs, 500 plastic washers, 450 pop rivets and 70 feet of molding, plus assorted hinges, screws and other hardware.

(Somehow I feel the people who have pop-rivet guns and the people who would assemble this, um, interesting decor item are generally not the same people.)

“Make Garbage Great” is an informative and entertaining book, and it will stay on my coffee table for a while. But securing a lower-waste future is going to take more than the solutions it offers.

It’s going to take serious, deep changes not only in our personal lives and the post-consumer recycling sector – in which TerraCycle, I grant, has an interesting and potentially important niche – but also in our laws and therefore in our legislatures.

We can’t just build it out of discarded drink pouches.

By Ron Meador | 08/31/15
Contributed to MINNPOST