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This is not a rant about why you should recycle, but I feel compelled to offer a little background information, based on my experience.
I work for a company that makes the equipment used in large recycling facilities and I can tell you that we are struggling to keep up with the demand for new equipment. As more goverments mandate diversion of solid waste, more and more facilities are being built to handle the load. Here in California, the most populous counties have target percentages of material that they must divert from the waste stream, or face stiff penalties. And those percentages are constantly increasing.
The current trend in recycling is called "Single Stream" which means you put all your recyclables in one container rather than separating them at the curb. This accomplishes two things. First, it makes it easy to do, which means more people will actually do it, and help the community reach its goals. Second, it saves a lot of money for the haulers. It's much more efficient than using segregated trucks, which have to return whenever one of the compartments is full.
But the various materials have to be separated, or it's just garbage. That's where our equipment comes in. We make machines that separate cardboard from paper, paper from containers, aluminum from plastic etc.
Now, an average facility can process 20 tons of material per hour or more. In one year, that equals over 80 million pounds of material that doesn't go into a landfill or an incinerator. That's just one facility in one medium sized community. There are hundreds across the country, and more being built. That also doesn't include the many tons of beverage containers processed by refund centers.
Never mind the trees that don't have to be cut down, the aluminum and tin that do not have to be mined, or the oil used for making plastics. At the very least, recycling will help keep us from one day finding ourselves buried under a coast-to-coast mountain of garbage.
And, to honor the thread topic, I recycle all my beverage containers. I take everthing to a refund center. I also live in an apartment that doesn't have recycling, so I try to sometimes haul my paper or other containers to the bins we have here at work.
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"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
Groucho Marx
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