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Mac's encourages recycling |
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Glass |
Aluminum |
Paper |
Plastic |
Wine
Corks |
Recycling Saves Energy
It takes less energy to make a product from recycled materials
than it does to make it from new materials. Using aluminum scrap
instead of bauxite ore to make new aluminum products cuts air
and water pollution by 95 percent.
If you want to do something for the environment, recycle those
aluminum cans!
By using materials more than once, we conserve
natural resources. In the case of paper, recycling saves trees
and water. Making a ton of paper from recycled stock saves up to
17 trees and uses 50 percent less water.
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Glass |
Using recycled glass
uses 30% LESS
ENERGY than making products from all new materials. |
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Aluminum |
Americans
use 100 million steel cans and 200 million aluminum beverage
cans every day. What should we do with this metal waste? Should
we burn it in waste-to-energy plants? Should we landfill it? Or
should we recycle it?
Americans throw away enough aluminum every three months to
rebuild our entire commercial air fleet.
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
Recycling is the most efficient way to reduce aluminum and steel
waste.
It saves energy—a lot of energy. The
aluminum recycled yearly in the U.S. saves about 11.5 billion
kilowatt-hours (kWh)—enough electricity to light a city the size
of Pittsburgh for six years.
Recycling two aluminum cans saves as much energy as the energy
in one cup of gasoline.
Making a pound of aluminum (32 beverage cans) from bauxite
ore takes 7.5 kilowatt-hours of electricity.
Making aluminum from recycled aluminum scrap,just one-third kWh.
- or - only four percent of the original energy amount
An
aluminum can recycled today will be back on the grocery shelf in
about 90 days
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What happens to recycled cans?
The
old aluminum cans are taken to an aluminum reclamation plant.
The cans are shredded into popcorn size chips and fed into a
melting furnace. The molten aluminum is gradually hardened into
rectangular slabs, called ingots, and then formed into thin
sheets of aluminum.
Aluminum can be recycled over and over again. It does not lose
its quality, and recycling it saves energy every time |
The metal
from recycled aluminum cans is usually made into new aluminum
cans. This is called closed-loop recycling because the old cans
are turned into the same thing again. Aluminum beverage
containers can be recycled into new cans and put back onto store
shelves within 90 days!
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Plastic |
Because plastics
are made from
fossil fuels, you can think of them as another form of stored
energy. Pound for pound, plastics contain as much energy as
petroleum or natural gas, and much more energy than other types
of garbage.
Plastic
are made primarily from oil
One ton of
plastic
bottles has about 5.4 barrels of oil in it (1).
Recycling
plastic
eliminates the need for that oil to make new
plastic.
It takes more energy to make
plastic
from oil than from recycled
plastic
Recycling
one ton of
plastic
bottles saves
the energy of about 4.5 barrels of oil (2)
We use
about 32 billion pounds of plastic a year--and recycle only
about 2% of it!
56% of the oil used in America is imported
53% of imported oil comes from OPEC counties
In 1987, the US used almost 1 billion barrels of
oil — enough to meet the nation“s oil demand for imported oil
for five months — just to make plastics |
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The cost of plastic is following the rise in oil prices,
boosting the value of recycled plastic.
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When oil hit $66 per barrel recently, almost double the price of
a year ago, a shipment of recycled milk jugs climbed to 28 cents
per pound, up from about 15 cents a pound |
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Paper |
What is
the number one material in the solid waste stream?
Paper is the
number one material that we throw away. For every 100 pounds of
trash we throw away, 39 pounds is paper. Newspapers take up
about 14 percent of landfill space, and paper in packaging
accounts for another 15 to 20 percent.
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CONSERVING through recycling |
A ton of
paper made from recycled fibers instead of virgin fibers
conserves:
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7,000 gallons of water
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17-31 trees |
4,000 KWh of electricity |
60
pounds of air pollutants |
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