Category: Recyling Works
Now, while the following list is not exhaustive, these identifiers are unique identifying numbers, characteristics or codes and must be, by law, properly safeguarded. For example: names, addresses, geocodes, all elements of dates-birth, death, appointment, admission, discharge & application, telephone & fax numbers, social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, medical records, account numbers, scores & reports, license numbers, vehicle ID and SN, license plate numbers, device identifiers, web universal resource locators (URL’s), internet protocol, finger & voice prints, full face photographic images, and the like!
“What do I do with these old tires?” One of the most popular recycling questions ever asked. Our best advice to you is to go to your local tire dealer to dispose of them properly. Tire dealers usually take unwanted tires for around $1.50 - $2.00 per tire, then turn them over to authorized recyclers.
Eight glasses of water a day? In today’s fast-paced society, how often are we near a glass and a kitchen faucet? The obvious answer to being able to drink this much water a day is, of course, is the ever-popular water bottle. It is estimated that, “every 27 hours Americans consume enough bottled water to circle the entire equator with plastic bottles stacked end to end. In just a single week, those bottles would stretch more than halfway to the moon — 155,400 miles.”*
When we were in high school and asked the question, “When am I ever going to use this again?”, we heard that we would need that math somewhere in our lives...but who would have thought it would be for recycling? Numbers, triangles, densities...what do all of these mean? Well, it’s not really math, and not as difficult as it sounds.
“Recycling one plastic bottle can save enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for six hours”.* Imagine how much energy Americans could save if every one of the estimated 30 to 50 billion water bottles that are thrown away each year were recycled! Although it seems impractical to think that every one of them would be recycled, if even half of them wound up in the recycling bin instead of the landfill, it would impact the United States greatly.
Can you spot the recycling in this trash container? Well, not only is it in there, but it’s staying in there. I mean, is it possible that a trash truck can compact several hundred pounds of waste material, dump it at a transfer station, take perfectly clean, untorn recycling bags out of it, and send it to a materials recycling facility (MRF) for use in manufacturing other products? It’s possible...but not very probable. Statistics show that this method of taking recycling materials mixed with trash to a dirty MRF for separation and eventual processing at a recycling facility can have very poor results.
Recycling has been around in some form as long as any of us can remember. We took glass and plastic bottles back to the grocery store for the deposit and we collected aluminum cans to take to the scrap yard for a little pocket change. We even understood the importance of repurposing items for other uses than their original intended use, which is why most of our parents had a bird feeder made from an old milk jug or a paper mache picture frame made from popsicle sticks and newspapers.