Trash and Recycling
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Trash and Recycling
How Much Do We Waste?
What we generally think of as trash is Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). This waste is also sometimes called post-consumer waste. Although most visible, this is a very small amount of the total trash we create.
Much more is created in the process of mining and manufacturing. For every ton of post-consumer waste, there is 20 tons of pre-consumer waste created along the way in the manufacturing process.
(Beyond the Wasteland, Guy Dauncey: http://www.earthfuture.com/lit/beyondthewasteland.asp)
Ecological Rucksack
The invisible trail of resource consumption and
waste is sometimes called the "ecological
rucksack.”
Recycling is good,
reusing is better, and if
you really want to save the
world: Reduce!
© Seppo Leinonen
Municipal Solid Waste
MSW is only 2 % of all the waste but it is still a lot of waste!
What is in it?
Recycling: Do you know these terms?
Recycling
Reusing
Reducing
Down-cycling
Recycling: A few helpful terms and definitions
Recycling: making a new product out of an old one
(e.g. making paper out of old newspaper instead of virgin wood fiber)
Reusing: extending the life of a product by reusing it
(e.g. reusing car parts, bringing a reusable cloth bag to the store)
Reducing: decreasing the amount of materials we use
(e.g. instead of having 15 pairs of shoes, just having 4).
Down-cycling: making a lower quality product out of recycled materials
(e.g. making park benches out of plastic from recycledbottles
plastic < paper and glass < metal
About Materials: Not all materials are created equal!
Aluminum We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda
cans every year.
A used aluminum can is recycled and back on the grocery shelf as a new can, in as little as 60 days. That's closed loop recycling at its finest!
There is no limit to the amount of times an aluminum can can be recycled.
Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours -- or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
©Copyright 2005 - 2009 Recycling-Revolution.com
About Materials: Not all materials are created equal!
PaperTo produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A supermarket could use all of them in under an hour. This means in one year, one supermarket goes through 60,500,000 paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are in the U.S.
If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
©Copyright 2005 - 2009 Recycling-Revolution.com
About Materials: Not all materials are created equal!
Glass Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper.
The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
A modern glass bottle would take 4,000 years or more to decompose -- and even longer if it's in the landfill.
Mining and transporting raw materials for glass produces about 385 pounds of waste for every ton of glass that is made. If recycled glass is substituted for half of the raw materials, the waste is cut by more than 80%.
Even larger energy savings can be achieved if glass products are reused in their original form, as is the case with many beer and soft-drink bottles in Europe and in developing countries.
©Copyright 2005 - 2009 Recycling-Revolution.com
Plastics Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every
hour.
Most of them are thrown away.
Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.
Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam coffee cups every year.
About Materials: Not all materials are created equal!
©Copyright 2005 - 2009 Recycling-Revolution.com
What do those numbers mean?
BPAPLA
Hazardous Waste
Some items contain hazardous material. The following are common household articles that contain hazardous materials.
Batteries
Florescent light bulbs
Cell Phones
Computers
Hazardous Waste
Batteries
Each year billions of used batteries are disposed of into solid
waste facilities in the United States. This constitutes 88% of the
mercury and 54% of the cadmium deposited into our landfills
Some batteries contain lead, mercury, and cadmium, with smaller
amounts of antimony, lithium, cobalt, silver, zinc, and other
chemicals. Some of these can cause serious pollution problems.
If you need to use batteries, use rechargeable.It is even better to avoid batteries all together.
Organic Solid Waste: Composting
Composting is nature’s way of recycling organic wastes into new soil used in vegetable and flower gardens, landscaping and many other applications.
. (taken from http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/reduce.htm)
How does my recycling get disposed
of?
Dawn QuirkWeb: tuftsrecycles.org
Hotline: (617) 627-3947
E-mail: [email protected]
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