Considering all the effort it takes these days to “take out the trash”, it’s small wonder that some of us might be curious if our at home recycling makes a difference. TLChowstuffworks.com provides us with some answers.
Twenty recycled cans can be made with the energy needed to produce just one single can using virgin materials. Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to keep a 100 watt bulb burning for almost four hours or run your television for three hours. Tossing a single aluminum can in the garbage wastes as much energy as pouring out half of that can’s volume of gasoline.
Glass is one of the most popular materials recycled because of its raw material composition — mostly sand — and because it can be recycled over and over again without degrading in quality. In fact, recycled glass is the main ingredient in making “new” glass and an estimated 80 percent of recovered glass containers are made into new glass bottles.
In addition to the recycled bottles going to a good place — new bottles — there are significant environmental savings to realize too.
Every 20 glass bottles recycled saves two pounds of carbon emissions; that adds up to 700 pounds of carbon emissions saved per ton of glass that’s melted down.
Each pound of mixed municipal solid waste (MSW) that you recycle is not only a pound saved from many years in a landfill, but saves 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.
Considering that the average person recycles (or composts) 1.5 pounds of MSW every day, it can really add up; every ton of recycled MSW saves 2.27 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
We recycle about 1.5 out of 4.5 pounds of MSW each day — about one-third of our waste. If we get that number closer to 50 per cent, or half of our waste recycled, we’d save 2,400 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per household each year.
