Recycling Essay -- Recycle Garbage Rubbish Papers

Recycling During the early 1970s, as communities across the United States saw their landfills filling up, attention turned to alternative methods of garbage disposal, such as incineration and recycling. While incineration proved to be a thorny issue due to its toxic ash byproduct, recycling was embraced by Americans as an effective way to offset rising garbage production rates. Today, demand for recycled products is beginning to match supply, and the percentage of waste going into landfills and incinerators is decreasing steadily. In 1970, when Americans produced 121 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW), three-quarters went directly into landfills, one-fifth was incinerated, and less than one-sixteenth was recycled. Now, with nearly double the MSW (more than 210 million tons per year), recycling accounts for almost one-quarter and incineration for a little over one-sixth. Indeed, widespread application of recycling throughout American communities has proven to be one of the great environmental success stories of the last quarter century. Accordingly, the trend toward fewer landfills continues. In 1988, for example, 8,000 landfills were scattered across the US; today little more than 3,000 remain. Meanwhile, nearly fifty percent of all Americans now have access to curbside recycling programs, while others, mostly in rural areas, can drop recyclables off at one of the nation's 2,600 transfer stations for recovery and diversion. And an increasing number of commercial and industrial operations are finding that recycling as much of their waste as possible saves hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on waste hauling and l... ...ls. At this time, a plastic recycling only minimally reduces the amount of virgin resources used to make plastics. Recycling papers, glass and metal, materials that are easily recycled more than once, saves far more energy and resources than are saved with plastics recycling. Consider this example: polyvinyl chloride (PVC) bottles are hard to tell apart from PET bottles, but one stray PVC bottle in a melt of 10,000 PET bottles can ruin the entire batch. It's understandable why purchasers of recycled plastics want to make sure that the plastic is sorted properly. Equipment to sort plastics is being developed, but currently most recyclers are still sorting plastics by hand. That's expensive and time consuming. Plastics also are bulky and cumbersome to collect. In short, they take up a lot of space in recycling trucks.