By using recycled materials instead of trees, minerals, oil and other raw materials extracted from the ground, recycling-based manufacturing conserves the world's scarce natural resources. This conservation reduces the pressure to expand mining and logging operations. Extracting and processing raw materials (wood, oil, ore) to make usable materials (paper, plastic, metal) requires a lot of energy.
Recycling
often saves energy because products that are recycled usually require much less processing to convert them into usable materials.Recycling saves energy by reducing or eliminating the need to manufacture materials from scratch. Making products from scratch can be labor-intensive and expensive to collect, move and refine the natural resources needed for paper, aluminum, plastic, etc. By using recycled materials instead of extracting new natural resources, manufacturers can manufacture the same products with less energy and less expense. Since recycled materials have already been refined and processed once, the second time, manufacturing consumes much less energy than the first.
When companies don't have to process raw materials from scratch, new products from recycled materials consume up to 30% less energy. Let's talk more about how the environment benefits when we recycle aluminum, plastic and paper. It manufactures garbage compactors and packers to help companies and organizations reduce their waste and maximize its recycling. For many products that are commonly recycled, saving energy also helps make recycling cheaper than extracting and processing raw materials.
However, leftover ink residue can create problems for manufacturers who want bright white paper (something difficult to achieve with recycled paper). At NIH, each person discards 1.04 pounds of trash per day and recycles 1.93 pounds of material. Recycled steel saves 60% of production energy, recycled newspapers 40%, recycled plastics 70% and recycled glass 40%. The greatest energy savings achieved through recycling generally occur in metals, which are usually easy to recycle and, moreover, are usually produced through the extraction and processing of minerals, which consume a lot of energy.
Aluminum, plastic, paper and cardboard can be collected and packaged for transport to the recycling center, where they are prepared for future reuse. For example, using recycled aluminum cans to make new aluminum cans uses 95% less energy than using bauxite ore, the raw material from which aluminum is made. With the amount of energy needed to make a virgin aluminum can, 20 recycled cans can be manufactured. The Environmental Protection Agency's iWarm tool allows people to estimate how much energy is saved by recycling common household items (for example, more than 100 billion aluminum cans are sold each year in the United States and less than half are recycled).
Recycling is the process of collecting and processing materials that would otherwise be thrown away and converted into new products.
