Organic Articles

Every year, Americans throw away 50 billion food and drink cans, 27 billion glass bottles and jars, and 65 million plastic and metal jar and can covers. More than 30% of our waste is packaging materials. Where does it all go? Some 85% of our garbage is sent to a dump, or landfill, where it can take from 100 to 400 years for things like cloth and aluminum to decompose. Glass has been found in perfect condition after 4,000 years in the earth!

We are quickly running out of space. It's time to learn the three R's of the environment: reduce, reuse, recycle. Then practice what you preach: don't buy things you don't need or items that come in wasteful packaging or that cannot be recycled. Reuse and recycle whatever you can.

Reduce
Reducing the amount of waste you produce is the best way to help the environment. There are lots of ways to do this. For example:
Buy products that don't have a lot of packaging. Some products are wrapped in many layers of plastic and paperboard even though they don't need to be. You can also look for things that are packed in materials that don't require a lot of energy or resources to produce. Some products will put that information right on their labels.
Instead of buying something you're not going to use very often, see if you can borrow it from someone you know.

Cars use up energy and cause pollution. Some ways to reduce the environmental damage caused by cars include carpooling with friends, walking, taking the bus, or riding your bike instead of driving.
Start a compost bin. Some people set aside a place in their yard where they can dispose of certain food and plant materials. Over time, the materials will break down through a natural process called decomposition. The compost is good for the soil in your yard and means that less garbage will go to the landfill.

You can reduce waste by using a computer! Many newspapers and magazines are online now. Instead of buying the paper versions, you can find them on the Internet. Also remember that you should print out only what you need. Everything you print that you don't really need is a waste of paper.

• Save energy by turning off lights that you are not using.
• Save water by turning off the faucet while you brush your teeth.

Lots of families receive a large amount of advertisements and other junk mail that they do not want. You can stop the mailings and reduce waste by writing to the following address and requesting that they take your name off of their distribution list:

Direct Marketing Association Mail Preference Service
P.O. Box 9008
Farmingdale, NY 11735-9008

Reuse
Instead of throwing things away, try to find ways to use them again! For example:

• Bring cloth sacks to the store with you instead of taking home new paper or plastic bags. You can use these sacks again and again. You'll be saving some trees!
• Plastic containers and reusable lunch bags are great ways to take your lunch to school without creating waste.
• Coffee cans, shoe boxes, margarine containers, and other types of containers people throw away can be used to store things or can become fun arts and crafts projects. Use your imagination!
• Don't throw out clothes, toys, furniture, and other things that you don't want anymore. Somebody else can probably use them. You can bring them to a center that collects donations, give them to friends, or even have a yard sale.
• Use all writing paper on both sides.
Use paper grocery bags to make book covers rather than buying new ones.
• Use silverware and dishes instead of disposable plastic utensils and plates.
• Store food in reusable plastic containers.

Recycle
Many of the things we use every day, like paper bags, soda cans, and milk cartons, are made out of materials that can be recycled. Recycled items are put through a process that makes it possible to create new products out of the materials from the old ones.

In addition to recycling the things you buy, you can help the environment by buying products that contain recycled materials. Many brands of paper towels, garbage bags, greeting cards, and toilet paper, to name a few examples, will tell you on their labels if they are made from recycled materials.

In some towns you can leave your recyclables in bins outside your home, and a truck will come and collect them regularly. Other towns have recycling centers where you can drop off the materials you've collected. Things like paper and plastic grocery bags, and plastic and aluminum cans and bottles can often be brought to the grocery store for recycling. Whatever your system is, it's important to remember to rinse out and sort your recyclables!

Paper
Did you know that for every ton of paper we recycle, 17 trees are saved? You can recycle several types of paper, including newspaper, cardboard, and high-quality papers like printer and notebook paper. (You may need to separate these different types of paper.)

So how does the paper you recycle turn into new paper products? Like this:

Paper is sorted by type and sent to a paper mill.
Hydrapulper cooks the paper until it is a thick soup of fibers. Detergents and chemicals remove inks. The paper is now pulp, which looks like cottage cheese.
Impurities are removed by a moving screen, spinners, and a series of washers.
Pulp is bleached with chlorine or other chemicals to make it white, and washed again.
Machine rolls out pulp and dries new paper.
Paper is cut to size, wrapped, and shipped.
Glass
Most types of glass, including your food and beverage containers, can be recycled. It's especially good to recycle glass because it does not naturally break down over time. Glass goes through a different recycling process than paper:

Impactor crushes glass into chunks of cullet, which is chunks of broken or waste glass, 3/4 inch in diameter.
Cullet is dropped into weighing bin along with ingredients to make new glass.
Cullet is put into furnace, which melts it into a thick syrup at 2,800°F.
Syrup flows out of furnace into an automatic feeder, where it is cut into bottle-size portions.
Bottle-size portions flow down a chute into molds, where they are shaped and cooled.
A small hole is made in the center by a machine, and air is blown into the bottle to hollow it out. A neck is shaped for a cap or lid.
Annealing oven, or leer, slowly heats, then cools, the glassware, making it strong.
Aluminum
Many states add a five or ten cent deposit to juice or soda cans when you buy them, which you can get back if you return the cans to the store for recycling. Here's how aluminum is recycled:

Cans are smashed and cut into dime-size shreds.
Shreds are placed in a gas-powered aluminum furnace, making liquid metal.
Liquid flows into molds that form ingots, or bars of metal.
Rollers squeeze the ingots into sheets for new cans.
Sheets are rolled into coils and sent to a plant, where they are shaped into cans again.

Plastic
Plastic is another material that takes a long time to break down—yet only about 5% of plastic is currently being recycled. Like aluminum cans, refundable plastic soda bottles can be brought back to the grocery store in many areas.

Other types of plastic can be recycled, too; some more easily than others. The most commonly recyclable types of plastic are polyethylene terephthalate, also called “Plastic #1,” and high-density polyethylene, called “Plastic #2.” Plastic #1 is the type of plastic that soda bottles are made out of. Plastic #2 is the type of plastic used to make milk jugs. You can tell what kind of plastic a container is made out of by looking for a number inside the recycle symbol (usually located on the bottom of the container).

Recycling Facts
• Recycling 1 ton of paper saves 17 trees and 7,000 gallons of water
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough electricity to run a TV for 3 hours
• Recycling one glass bottle or jar saves enough electricity to light a 100-watt bulb for four hours
• Recycling one ton of plastic saves the equivalent of 1,000–2,000 gallons of gasoline
• More than 30 million trees are cut down to produce a year’s supply of newspapers

Fact Monster/Information Please® Database, © 2005 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.