The Truth About Recycling By Chloe Fedor

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Recycling bins are in our homes, schools and all over the world; our minds are trained to recycle every substance that is possibly recyclable. We often point to recycling as a superhero- like throwing away our plastics bottles are slapping pollution in the face! One by one we are cleaning up the environment by making small lifestyle changes like using reusable water bottles, but some of our changes are actually hurting the environment around us. Five negative effects from recycling are:

1) Contamination is a huge problem in the recycling industry. For example, when lead paint from an aluminum spray can makes it through the recycling process, it usually ends up being buried in the new product- usually a soda can. Contamination causes a huge problem when hundreds of buildings in Taiwan, made from recycled steel, were giving people gamma radiation poisoning for twelve years starting in 2000.

2) Air pollution will always be an issue in our world. The process of recycling alone produces tons of pollutants from the exhaust of recycling trucks to producing energy at plants. Each recycling truck contains over three dozen airborne toxins. With that information in mind, there were about 179,000 waste collection vehicles on roads in 2009- all together the recycling trucks produced about 6,444,000 toxins.


3) Paper Sludge Process- when paper is being recycled, all the paper will be mixed up into a soft, shapeless matter known as pulp. The pulp is washed, cleaned and pressed into new paper which is the process of recycling, but during this process, wastes including paper fibers, inks, chemicals and dyes are filtered out into one huge paper sludge. The sludge is then sent to be burned or into a landfill, where it can produce a lot of toxic chemicals into groundwater.

4) Most cans aren't really recyclable. Two of the seven plastics in life are really recyclable; the other five of the seven will be collected, processed and thrown into a landfill. Some of these five plastics can slip through when they aren't supposed to, and you can end up with chemicals like BPA in your new plastic products.

AND . . . 

Did you know that only around 27% of plastic bottles are recycled?


5) Is Recycling - all it is made out to be? The biggest reason recycling hurts the environment so much is because of the mind set it gives our society. We all believe that just by tossing the bottle in the recycling bin and buying recyclable products, we're kicking pollution's butt and everything will be okay. But how much of a difference is it all making if the United States is still producing 250 million tons of trash every year.



Although recycling has many positive effects and is a great way to be a greener, more healthy planet, recycling still convinces us that it is okay to be wasteful in other areas of our lives, simply because we make up for it through recycling.

Comments

  1. Shane McgeeNovember 25, 2015 at 5:49 AM

    We should promote the concept of recycling in order to protect our environment as well as human being; most probably after using or after expire of any products we used to throw it away. So instead of throwing products we should follow the process of recycling and give those products a good shape for use; recycling of things like plastics, bottles, paper cups, clothes and many others would be beneficial and profitable for us. Here from this post we used to learn some crucial facts through which we are able to understand and promote recycling process.
    recycling project

    ReplyDelete

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