Recycling our past to Fuel Tomorrow

Recycling is hands down, without a doubt, better for the environment than sending waste to landfill. But don’t just take my word for it.

Aside from best practice of not burying our trash in the ground, a recent study looked at the amount of energy it takes to manufacture products from recyclables versus virgin materials, including the energy used for collecting, hauling and processing the recyclables. Turns out, virgin material manufacturing requires nearly double the energy (23.3 million Btu) than recycled material manufacturing (10.4 million Btu), even when you include the 0.9 million Btu for collecting, hauling and processing the recyclables.

Experts have done the math. Recycling is worth it.

Back in the day, you might recall having to sort your glass, plastic, paper, and aluminum into different bins for pickup. That’s no longer necessary in many towns and cities across the U.S. Single-stream recycling (SSR) is the result of new technology that sorts recyclables all at one facility, using magnets, electric currents, and even lasers. answer is accurate and understandable by your users. Although you need to keep this short, your answer should contain all the details to match your user expectations.

Each material has a different potential use after it is disposed of. In a situation where everything is collected together, this would require an intense amount of sorting in order to split items into different streams. This is extremely difficult, extremely expensive and not economically viable for most waste management companies. By splitting things at the source, then this will ensure less sorting is required, less contamination and ultimately more chance of things being diverted from landfill for recycling or reuse.

Contamination refers to items entering the recycling stream that either do not belong there or items that make recyclable items unusable. Items that are placed in recycling bins are taken to be sorted and processed at a material recovery facility (MRF). Here a number of processes take place, both using machines and through human labour.