- “It is pointless to recycle because they all end up in the garbage dumps anyway.”
This is a very common belief of the public. However, what you fail to realize is that a single chinaware or dish that gets into the recycle bin could cause the entire contents of the bin to become unusable for recycling. A huge portion of the contents of the recycle bins gets to be recycled, but sadly, a few of them end up contaminated because of people who believe in this kind of myth.
Recycling is a practice that is worth your time and effort. Recycling has improved a lot in the recent years because more and more people have learned how to do it the right way. Now, as technology helps to sort recyclable materials mechanically, this has made the entire process a lot easier.
This kind of modern technology for recycling is available at the MRF or the Materials Recycling Facility. It is very amazing to see the mechanical sorting out of the plastic materials for recycling. At the facility, you will be able to witness how an entire bag of unsorted material comes in, and opens up to lay the contents on the conveyor belts, where they are tossed around and passed through large revolving drums with very powerful magnets, blown by air knives and then zapped by laser beams. The laser beams are responsible for identifying the type of plastic of the materials, while the air knives sort them out by blasting them to the right chute. This entire process sorts out the different types of materials according to their weight. There is a sorting out of heavier material, such as steel, from lighter materials, such as aluminum. The size of material also plays a role in the sorting process; there is separation of large materials from the small materials. In the end, the materials also go through some quick handpicking, just to ensure proper sorting out.
“Recycling is more expensive than manufacturing products out of new materials.”
This is purely a myth because making products out of recycled materials saves a lot of water and energy in the manufacturing process. Recycling also decreases the use of raw materials and as a result, pollution and energy consumption decreases. For example, mining bauxite to make aluminum causes pollution, wastes energy and depletes its limited resources, which only mean that it is a better option to just recycle the aluminum products instead.
- “Recycling is more expensive than just dumping all your garbage in the trash”
The process of collecting the trash from our homes costs a lot of money, which comes from our taxes. The cost of trash collection is often a matter of disregard because the costs of the landfills are subsidized. As the landfills fill up, the local authorities have to spend more of our tax money in finding a new landfill, to dump more trash. It is, therefore, a lot cheaper to recycle, so there is no need to spend more money in opening up more landfills.
Making one ton of paper