Many of us are familiar with the concept of recycling: taking items that have reached the end of their usefulness and reprocessing them into new products. It is a vital part of our waste management system. Recycling reduces greenhouse gas emissions, saves energy, supplies valuable raw materials for manufacturing, creates jobs and stimulates the development of greener technologies.
There are a number of ways to recycle, but the most common involves “external” recycling—sorting and dropping off waste for processing. This can be done at buy-back centers, drop-off centers, or curbside collection programs. In a buy-back program, consumers get paid for their recycled materials; in a drop-off program they do not. In curbside programs, residents separate their waste and deposit it at the curb for pickup by a local authority.
After being collected, recyclables go to a material recovery facility (MRF) or other processing plant. Here they are sorted from other materials, cleaned, melted and reformed into new products.
Paper products, for example, are shredded and washed before being melted and reformed into new sheets. Metals, such as aluminum and steel cans, are melted, purified, cooled and reformed into various new metal items. For example, a recovered aluminum can becomes a soda or beer can, a piece of aluminum foil or even an automobile bumper.
One of the best reasons for recycling is to preserve natural resources. It takes far more work and time to mine and process raw natural resources than it does to reuse existing materials, so proper recycling helps use existing natural resources and protects the environment from destruction from new mining.