Recycling Saves Our Enviroment

Recycling Reduces Greenhouse Gas Emissions

By reducing the amount of energy used by industry, recycling also reduces greenhouse gas emissions and helps prevent global climate change. This is because much of the energy used in industrial processes and in transportation involves burning fossil fuels like gasoline, diesel and coal, the most important sources of carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions into the environment. Additional benefits are derived from reduced emissions from incinerators and landfills and by slowing the harvest of trees, which are carbon sinks. In 2004, recycling reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2 million metric tons of carbon equivalent.

Recycling Reduces Emissions of Air and Water Pollutants

In addition to greenhouse gases, recycling can reduce a range of pollutants from entering the air and water. By decreasing the need to extract and process new raw materials from the earth, recycling can eliminate the pollution associated with the initial stages of a product's development: material extraction, refining and processing. These activities pollute the air, land and water with toxic materials, such as ammonia, carbon monoxide, methane, and sulfur dioxides. Further reductions are achieved as a result of energy saving, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other air pollutants. In addition to the greenhouse gas reductions mentioned previously, additional reductions of air emissions due to recycling total 587,000 tons . Reduced water emissions total nearly 9,000 tons.

How Can We Recycle

You can recycle all of the following items:

-newspapers
-magazines
-junk mail (including window envelopes)
-white and yellow telephone directories
-flattened cardboard
-computer paper
-all types and colours of glass bottle (like wine and beer bottles)
-all types and colours of glass jars but please remove the lids
-drink cans
-food tins (spaghetti, tuna, fruit etc)
-aerosol cans (if completely empty)
-all plastic bottles (such as soft drink bottles or fabric conditioner bottles)

What Is Recycling

Recycling means taking materials from products you have finished using and making brand new products with them. For example, most of the aluminum cans in the United States are made with recycled aluminum.

Making new things from recycled ones takes less money, less energy, and less of the Earth’s resources. Because less energy is used, factories in the United States don’t release as much pollution either.

Recycling starts with people separating recyclable materials from their other trash. The separated recyclable materials are collected by recycling programs, processed and then sold to manufacturers for use in new products.