Recycling is great. Or so it seems. I always try to throw my plastic water bottles in the blue recycling bins, throw out soda cans, and even use a reusable water bottle to reduce my plastic water bottle impact completely. But is recycling worth it?
Recycling started when a barge, Mobro 4000, drove thousands of miles along the waters of the east coast, trying to get rid of its trash from its home, Long Island. People started to recycle when they realized their landfills were running out of room. This, and much more, was published in this famous article written in 1996. The author, John Tierney, basically called recycling garbage (the title of the article is literally “Recycling is Garbage”). Was Tierney right?
One thing Tierney was right about was that America would NOT run out of room in its landfills. A commonly cited statistic is that the United States’ trash for the next 1000 years could fit into a landfill only 100 yards deep, and 35 miles on each side (which is not that big if you consider it is 1000 years of trash).
A landfill: a place where trash is dumped and later buried and covered with soil
We know we don’t need to recycle for saving space in landfills, but overall do we need to? Consider the following quote: “Take the much- maligned plastic water bottle. It’s almost always made from petroleum, a resource that certainly seems worth conserving, and if you chuck it in the trash, the container will live on in a landfill for centuries. But how much diesel fuel does the truck that collects these bottles burn? How much energy does the recycling plant consume; what fumes does it emit into the atmosphere? And what does it all cost, anyway?”
People might think that throwing their bottle or can in the magic blue bin automatically makes the world a better place, but does it? Do the benefits outweigh the costs? You’re about to find out.
For some products, it does. Aluminum cans are the best to recycle: they require 96% less energy to recycle than if a brand new aluminum can was to be created. Plastic bottles use 76% less energy and newsprint uses 45% less energy. You must be thinking: this is great! They all use less energy so that means recycling is what we need to keep doing! Not 100% true. Another product we commonly recycle is glass. Glass only uses about 21% less energy, and you might be thinking this is still good. Recycling glass is basically getting back to its “virgin material”, which is sand. We are nowhere near a sand shortage, so we really don’t need to recycle glass, although it is not bad to. But recycling glass is more of a hassle than it really needs to be, especially because we don’t need to conserve its raw material like we do with other products.
Carolina Recycle Loop explains their recycling process for cans
A big (and often overlooked) issue with recycling is how it is done. A recycling plant is SUPER expensive, and needs a huge single, up-front capital investment. This needs to later be turned into a state-of-the-art single stream recycling plant and program. Once that is in place, recycling is super efficient. But without it, it cannot be efficient. Take PVC pipe for example. PVC is recyclable, but most plants don’t have the means to recycle it. So it takes up space traveling to the recycling plant, only to be sorted into trash ending up in a landfill.
There is a very large initial cost to creating a recycling plant, but once that is in place, products (especially aluminum cans), can be recycled many times and save plenty of energy and resources. This article cites that a ton of recyclables takes 10.4 million Btu to recycle. The additional collecting, hauling, and processing of these said recyclables adds only .9 million Btu. This totals 11.3 million Btu to manufacture one ton of recyclables. Creating products from virgin materials takes 23.3 million Btu. And for all you people who do like science and are curious, a Btu is a measurement of energy, equivalent to around 1055 joules. Not only would recycling be saving energy, but it would be reducing the same amount of greenhouse gases if 38 million cars were taken off the road (AKA a lot of greenhouse gases).
So overall, is recycling worth it? My answer would be yes, it is especially if there are already recycling plants and programs in place. The main downfall to recycling is setting up plants, but once they are set up recycling is beneficial to society.
This was really interesting to read. I feel like society today has become “obsessed” with recycling but no one really knows what happens when you through a bottle into the “magical blue bin”. I also always find it interesting to see how much these things cost. Although what we are doing is conserving and helping the environment, it is interesting to see if the actual cost of the process weighs out the benefits. I never knew that the glass bottles are turned into sand, so I would love to look further and see where does that sand go? and are there other things we can do with it so it can be more beneficial?