U.S. EPA Recycling News

We cannot sustain our consumerist lifestyle without getting inundated by garbage and exhausting the earth’s resources. The products that we use are wrapped in several layers of packaging material that are perfectly recyclable – plastic, aluminum, paper, tin, wood, etc. Solid waste disposal experts engage in an uphill struggle to contain this virtual avalanche of garbage we produce everyday. It is apparent that digging a hole, a landfill, is clearly not the answer. Sooner or later, the waste becomes uncontainable and will spill into our farming areas, forests, and water sources.

Here are 7 good reasons why we should recycle:

• Financial Income – There is money in recycling. In the level of the individual, one of the benefits of recycling is financial income. There are a lot of things lying around the house that we no longer want or need that might just end up in a dumpsite somewhere, that we can recycle and earn money from. Cell phones, PDAs, ink cartridges, etc. Here at PaceButler, for instance, a phone sent in for recycling could net the owner as much as $50. There is also the financial benefit for the communities who recycle in that there will be reduced costs of waste disposal or recycling. You think recycling is expensive? Consider these recycling facts: aluminum cans are the most valuable item in your bin. Aluminum can recycling helps fund the entire curbside collection. It’s the only packaging material that more than covers the cost of collection and reprocessing for itself.


• Recycling helps conserve limited resources – Throwing away a single aluminum can, versus recycling it, is like pouring out six ounces of gasoline. Last year, Americans recycled enough aluminum cans to conserve the energy equivalent of more than15 million barrels of oil. Here are some compelling recycling facts from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection: By recycling over 1 million tons of steel in 2004, Pennsylvanians saved 1.3 million tons of iron ore, 718,000 tons of coal, and 62,000 tons of limestone. Through recycling newsprint, office paper and mixed paper, we saved nearly over 8.2 million trees.


• Recycling is energy efficient – On a larger scale, recycling could translate into huge reductions in our energy costs. Consider these facts: It costs more energy to manufacture a brand new aluminum can than it does to recycle 20 aluminum cans. 20 cans can be made from recycled material using the same energy it takes to make one new can.
• Recycling builds community – In almost all communities in the country today, there is a growing concern for recycling and the environment. People are working together in recycling programs, lobbies, and free recycle organizations to help promote recycling. We will be featuring these groups in our upcoming posts and link with the various networks to help you locate the nearest recycling center or free recycle group nearest your location.


• Recycling creates jobs – Incinerating 10,000 tons of waste creates one job; landfilling 10,000 tons of waste creates six jobs; recycling 10,000 tons of waste creates 36 jobs.


• Recycling builds a strong economy – Done on a nationwide scale, like what we’re doing here in the US, recycling has a huge impact in our economy in terms of jobs, energy cost reduction, resources conservation. Lately, as the price of oil hits close to $120 a barrel, people have become more aware of the huge impact of recycling, particularly in reducing plastic waste material coming from the bottled water and beverage industry. We will be discussing this in detail in our future posts.


• Recycling is Earth-friendly – No matter how safe and efficient our landfills are being billed to be, the possibility of dangerous chemicals coming from the solid waste deposited in these landfills, contaminating underground water supply is always present. Combustion or incineration of our solid waste is effective and energy-generating, but we pay the price in increased air pollution.



On the other hand, recycling just 35 percent of our trash reduces toxic emissions equivalent to taking 36 million cars off the road. In 2006, according to the EPA, the national recycling rate of 32.5 percent (82 million tons recycled) “prevented the release of approximately 49.7 million metric tons of carbon into the air–roughly the amount emitted annually by 39 million cars, or 1,300 trillion BTUs, saving energy equivalent to 10 billion gallons of gasoline.”

• The average American uses 650 pounds of paper each year – 100 million tons of wood could be saved each year if all that paper was recycled.
• Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.
• A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That's a lot of containers that can all be recycled!
• About 80% of what Americans throw away is recyclable, yet our recycling rate is only 28%.
• Every month Americans throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper (think: Empire State Building), but all of these jars are recyclable!
• Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures a year! Ever heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It's twice the size of Texas and is floating somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. It's also 80 percent plastic, and weighs in at 3.5 million tons.
• Recycling one ton (about 2,000 pounds) of paper saves 17 trees, two barrels of oil (enough to run the average car for 1,260 miles), 4,100 kilowatts of energy (enough power for the average home for six months), 3.2 cubic yards of landfill space, and 60 pounds of pollution.
• The 17 trees saved by recycling one ton of paper can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air each year.
• If all of our newspapers were recycled, we could save about 250 million trees each year! If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we could save about 25 million trees each year.
• More than 20 million Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of aluminum foil. Believe it not, ALL that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it so most it goes in the trash!
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours. In spite of this, Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every three months!
• On average a computer is 23% plastic, 32% ferrous metals, 18% non-ferrous metals (lead, cadmium, antimony, beryllium, chromium and mercury), 12% electronic boards (gold, palladium, silver and platinum), and 15% glass.
• Obsolete computers contain significant amounts of recoverable materials including metals from wires and circuit boards, glass from monitors, and plastics from casings. For example, 1 metric ton (t) of electronic scrap from personal computers (PC’s) contains more gold than that recovered from 17 tons of gold ore.