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The US Environmental Protection Agency interprets recycling as the "sorting, collecting, and processing materials to manufacture and sell them as new products." In a world enduring manifold environmental challenges like pollution and climate change, of which we are all answerable, recycling is one sure way to help clean up the environment and prevent more waste from being dumped in our landfills and worse, in the world's oceans. Not caring is not one of our choices at this 11th hour. Here are some recycling facts to help us put in proper view just how significant recycling is. Recycling saves energy and resources by trimming down the need for fresh material for the factories. It also serves to defend the environment by reducing trash and pollution. It limits the emission of warming fumes to the atmosphere by reducing incineration of garbage and the burning of fossil fuel for manufacturing and transport. Recycling facts about plastic Plastic, a product of our contemporary wasteful lifestyle, at one time was proclaimed as a progressive discovery - it even won a trophy in the World's Fair in London in 1862. It's light, supple, and highly durable. Unluckily, over time, it is this very sturdiness of plastic that has surfaced to be an ecological nightmare for us. A hunk of plastic thrown away today takes ages to rot, it will stay as plastic for at least 500 years before total deterioration. Envion, a company from Washington D.C., in the United States, just a few weeks ago unveiled a new facility that's said to convert plastic refuse into fuel. If this is correct, it could emerge to be the quick fix to the environment's plastic pollution dilemma. With this application, it will become profitable for business to mine landfills and the oceans for plastic to satiate the industries' need for more fuel and energy. Recycling plastics save two times the energy compared to burning these in an incinerator. Have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It's believed to be twice the size of the state of Texas and holds as much as 100 million tons of plastic waste. Due to the action of the sun and sea water, the plastic in this area is splitting into tiny little pieces and are mistaken for food by fish and other sea organisms, which we eat - the plastic we nonchalantly cast off has returned through the food chain to torment us all. Recycling facts about paper Traditional newspapers like The Daily Telegraph or The Los Angeles Times, or your local hometown Gazette are griping that subscriptions have been inexorably plummeting down in recent years as readers are now sourcing their news from the internet. The paperless Computer Age may be bad news to our old-style news dailies, but it's certainly a boon to the rain forests. To print one weekend issue of all broadsheets in the United States, half a million trees were cut down for their pulp to make all that paper. In America, 85 million tons of paper are discarded yearly - that's equal to 680 lbs. for every person in this country. If you have a Mac at home wired to the internet, please stop ALL subscriptions to physical version of your daily or favorite glossy. If only 1 for every 10 dailies read and thrown away in the United States is reused, that's equal to sparing 25 million trees yearly. Recycling facts about metal Like plastic, aluminum is also extremely durable and will stay intact in the dump site for a very long time. An aluminum can thrown away in a landfill today will persist on as the same aluminum can for the next 1,000 years! The aluminum cans we trash every year is enough to rebuild the entire US commercial air fleet three times over. Turning in a single ton of aluminum is equivalent to storing electricity to power an ordinary US home for 10 years! Aluminum containers represent the excellent illustration for what is known as closed-loop recycling system. This indicates that every post-consumer aluminum can may be processed to make a fresh new container, which can be back in your local grocery in as short as 4-6 weeks - closed-loop, nothing wasted. You can find out more recycling facts on the internet and at school. You can also ask your town's sanitation executive to get more localized recycling information. Recycling is absolutely an important part in our unified resolution to preserve the planet and make our world a better and wonderful place to live in. Let's recycle.
Article Source: http://www.mycontentbuilder.com
Michael Arms writes about recycling facts and other topics for the Pacebutler Recycling Blog. Pacebutler Corporation is a U.S. cell phone trading company - you may sell, recycle, or donate cell phones to your favorite charity through Pacebutler.
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