Recycling

Introduction

Recycling is the process of collecting used materials, separating them into types, and using them to manufacture new products. All industrialized countries encourage recycling today, for several reasons. First, landfills—open pits into which garbage is dumped, then covered withdirt—have become expensive to operate. Recycling, by reducing the amount of trash that has to be buried, saves cities money. Second, recycling reduces the extraction and manufacture of fresh materials by mining, drilling, and logging, which reduces harm to the environment. Third, making products from recycled materials uses less energy than making the same products entirely from fresh materials. Since making most types of energy causes greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide to be released to the atmosphere, recycling combats global warming.

Although recycling of basic metals such as steel and copper has been a profit-making business for over a century, recycling of municipal waste—ordinary garbage—is sometimes criticized by skeptics as inefficient, a useless practice motivated by environmental guilt-feelings rather than economic rationality. Few governments have, however, been persuaded by such arguments, and several scientific studies have shown that most recycling programs do benefit the environment.

Historical Background and Scientific Foundations

Since metalworking was first discovered about 4,500 years ago, metals have been recycled because it is easier to re-use metal than to extract it from ore (metal-bear-ing rock). Since the Industrial Revolution began in the late 1700s, societies have became more and more dependent on metal, making bridges, the frames of tall buildings, and steam engines out of iron or steel (a alloy of iron and carbon) and, later, electrical machinery out of copper. In the mid-twentieth century, aluminum also began to be used in large quantities. Businesses devoted to recovering used metal sprang up in the 1800s along with increased demand for metal. These business turned a profit by collecting scrap, sorting it, and selling it to metal manufacturers.

National security has also motivated recycling. During World War II (1939–1945), the United States and other combatant countries experienced shortages of rubber and metal because international trade was disrupted by the war. They therefore ran campaigns marketing recycling as a patriotic act. For example, one slogan promoted in the United States in the early 1940s urged, “A rubber tire saves seven men / When melted down and used again” (to help make an inflatable life-raft).

The modern environmental ethic of recycling, which seeks to reduce usage of primary resources and lessen environmental harm, is a more recent invention. The very word “recycling” did not begin to be used for the re-use of materials from consumer trash until 1970, when the modern environmental movement was just coming into being. In the space of a few years from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, millions of people became aware that their industrial society was producing vast amounts of pollution and garbage. The idea that industrial materials might be used in an endless cycle, like the water, air, and minerals of natural ecosystems, was attractive because it promised to re-shape industrial society along sustainable, natural lines.

A few curbside pickup recycling programs, where trucks traverse the streets of a town to pick up separated trash materials in front of homes, were begun by U.S. cities and towns in the early 1970s. However, the recy-cling movement grew slowly because of an economic chicken-and-egg problem: There were already well-established markets for steel and aluminum, but without markets for recycled paper, glass, and plastic, there were

WORDS TO KNOW

COMPOSTING: Breakdown of organic material by microorganisms.

E-WASTE: A term describing electronic equipment at the end of its useful life. E-waste is the fastest-growing type of waste in the world.

SUSTAINABILITY: Practices that preserve the balance between human needs and the environment, as well as between current and future human requirements.

too few places to send such materials once they had been collected. At the same time, a market could not develop until sufficient amounts of recyclables were available. Supply and demand had to grow together, which took time.

In the meantime, bottle bills (also called deposit laws) began to be passed. Bottle bills are laws that require a surcharge, usually a nickel or a dime, to be charged on certain beverages (beer, soda, sometimes bottled water). This money is collected by sellers and bottlers. When consumers return the beverage containers, they are given back the deposit in cash. The first bottle bill in North America was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia in 1970; in 1971, Oregon became the first U.S. state to pass a deposit law. By 1985, 10 states had passed deposit laws. Hawaii became the eleventh state with such a law in 2005. At that time, about 30% of the U.S. population lived in a deposit-law state.

Meanwhile, similar concerns about the environment and recycling were being felt in Europe. On July 15, 1975, the European Union adopted its Council Directive on Waste, which read, in part, “Member States shall take appropriate steps to encourage the prevention, recycling and processing of waste, the extraction of raw materials and possibly of energy there from and any other process for the re-use of waste.” In response, European countries began to develop recycling programs of their own. In 1991, Germany adopted its Green Dot (Grüne Punkt) program, an industry-funded system for recycling packaging. By 2008, 23 European countries were participating in the program, which requires companies selling packaged products to contribute to the cost of recovering and recycling their own packaging. The more packaging a company puts on its product, the higher the fee it must pay to the Green Dot program. This encourages companies to use less packaging, as well as to fund recycling.

In the United States, interest in recycling surged in the late 1980s, when national discussion of landfill costs and other trash-disposal options was triggered by the strange journey of the garbage scow Mobro, which was loaded with over 3,100 tons of municipal trash from Long Island in New York State. The Mobro wandered the Caribbean and the East Coast of the United States looking in vain for a place to unload. Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas all refused the garbage, as did Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas. The trash was eventually incinerated in the Long Island town where it came from, but not before triggering national discussion of landfilling, incineration, and recycling. At that time, 80% of U.S. trash was put in landfills, 10% was incinerated (burned), and only 10% was recycled.

Weeks of headlines about the Mobro, combined with rising prices for landfilling, moved communities to institute recycling programs. By 2008, the United States was recycling 32.5% of its solid municipal waste, including household trash. Fifty-two percent of paper, 31% of plastic carbonated-beverage bottles, 45% of aluminum beverage cans, 63% of steel cans, and 67% of refrigerators, stoves, and other large appliances were being recycled. This was similar to recycling rates in other industrialized countries, though some ranked as low as 18% (United Kingdom) and others as high as 80% (Japan). Yet progress had not been inexorable. In 1992, the U.S. beverage container recycling rate was 53%; by 2005, it was down to 33%, and Americans were failing to recycle 144 billion beverage containers per year, including 54 billion aluminum cans, 52 billion plastic containers, 30 billion glass containers, and 10 billion miscellaneous cartons and pouches.

How Recycling Works: One Successful City Program

In 2008, San Francisco, with a population of about 760,000, had a recycling rate of 70%, the highest of any large U.S. city. Using a fleet of specially designed garbage trucks that run on biodiesel fuel and have a separate compartment for recyclables, the city collects mixed loads of paper, cans, and bottles.

Except for organic wastes such as food scraps and lawn clippings, all recyclables from curbside pickup are trucked to a central facility where 155 employees processed 750 tons of glass, metals, plastic, and paper every day (as of 2008). When a truck arrives at the centers, its recyclables are dumped onto conveyor belts that take them to a station for sorting by hand. Workers pull out plastic bags, which can jam machinery further down the line, and any objects of unusual shape or size. Spinning disks then separate paper from dense objects like bottles and cans.

On the paper line, brown (corrugated) cardboard is separated by hand from mixed paper (magazines, envelopes, office paper, paperboard). Plastics are separated by hand into three streams, namely HDPE (high-density polyethylene, type 2), PET (polyethylene terephthalate, type 1), and mixed (all other plastics). Magnets pull out steel cans from the stream of glass and metal containers. Aluminum is not normally affected by magnets, but a method called eddy-current separation is used to push aluminum out. In eddy-current separation, rapidly rotating magnets below the trash stream cause electrical currents to flow in aluminum objects. The aluminum objects are temporarily magnetized by these eddy currents and are pushed away from the rotating magnets.

After plastic, steel, and aluminum have been removed from the container stream, only glass is left. This is separated into clear, brown, amber, and green streams, all re-used separately.

The materials thus recovered are then sold to processors to be made into new materials. San Francisco’s recycled paper, for example, is shipped to China, where it is used to manufacture paper packaging for manufactured goods, many of which are shipped back to the United States. The city can charge a higher price for its waste paper because its special garbage trucks do not crush glass bottles when they are collecting recyclables, meaning that the city’s paper has an unusually low rate of contamination by glass fragments.

In 1996, researchers hired by the city confirmed that 19% of the waste going into its landfills consisted of food scraps and garden waste. (Nationwide, about 12% of the landfill waste stream consists of food, lawn clippings, and the like.) In 1997, the city began a program to compost food scraps from restaurants; by 2008 it was composting 300 tons of food scraps per day. Composting entails grinding up the scraps of food, plant trimmings, soiled paper, and other organic waste and allowing them to be partly digested by bacteria for about 60 days. The resulting soil-like material has little odor and makes a high-quality fertilizer that is sold to California vineyards as organic compost.

In 2008, the mayor of the city, Gavin Newsom, was planning to send the city’s Board of Supervisors a proposal to make recycling of household trash, including food scraps and yard waste, mandatory rather than voluntary. Residents who did not recycle would face suspension of garbage pickup. The goal was to raise the city’s recycling rate to 75%, a figure mandated for 2010 by the city council.

Paper and cardboard

In 2007, 56% of paper consumed in the United States—54.3 million tons—was recycled, about 360 pounds (163 kg). This was over twice the 25 million tons recycled in 1990.

Paper and cardboard are recycled by shredding them and adding their fibers to the pulp stage of paper manufacture. The strength of paper or cardboard depends on its structure of interlocking fibers: If the fibers are too short, the material tears easily. Each time a paper fiber is recycled, it tends to get broken, so recycled paper has

shorter fibers. Paper fibers can be recycled up to six times before they become too short to use.

Recycling paper saves energy and has other environmental benefits. Making one ton of paper from recycled fibers rather than virgin fibers from trees saves 7,000 gallons (27,000 liters) of water, 4,000 kWh of electricity, and 60 pounds (27 kg) of air pollutants.

Beverage Containers

Packaging, including containers, is the largest single category of municipal waste (32%). About 15% of all packaging waste consists of beverage containers. Two hundred billion beverage containers are sold each year in the United States (over 500 million per day), and two-thirds are sent to landfills, thrown on the ground as litter, or incinerated. Americans wasted more than two times as many aluminum cans in 2001 as they did in 1981. The wasting of aluminum cans is particularly unfortunate, not because the cans are a form of toxic pollution—like glass and steel, aluminum is ecologically harmless—but because they are a wasted opportunity. Large amounts of electricity are needed to refine aluminum from raw ore, whereas the aluminum in a beverage container is already pure. Making an aluminum can from recycled aluminum therefore takes only 5% as much energy as making it out of virgin ore. Recycling a single aluminum can saves enough energy to run a 100 watt lightbulb for about 4 hours. In 2001, America’s waste aluminum, with an average scrap value of $0.58 per pound, was worth almost $800 million—revenue that has literally been poured into holes in the ground. There are a number of reasons for this market failure, one being the erosion by inflation of the deposit on beverage containers in 11 U.S. states. In 1971, when the first U.S. bottle bill was enacted, a 5-cent deposit had as much buying power as 25 cents had in 2007. Yet deposits in most states have remained at five cents. Bottle deposits are thus worth a fifth as much today as they were when they were first enacted.

Glass recycling does not save as much energy as aluminum recycling. However, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, an arm of the federal government, states that recycling a single glass bottle saves enough energy to run a 100-watt lightbulb for four hours. Less energy is saved per pound by recycling glass than by recycling aluminum, but a single glass beverage container weighs much more than an aluminum beverage can, so the energy saving per container ends up being about the same.

Electronics

One of the fastest-growing types of municipal solid waste is e-waste, that is, discarded electronics such as computers, televisions, photocopiers, printers, scanners, and MP3 players. In 2000, over 2,100,000 tons of e-waste were generated in the United States; about 55% of it consisting of televisions and 10% of personal computers. In 2004 alone, 315 million personal computers were discarded in the United States (many were stored in closets, basements, and garages, rather than going immediately to landfills or recycling). Each year, about 130 million cell phones are retired, about 98% of them going into landfills. E-waste contains lead, mercury, cadmium, brominated fire retardants, and other toxic substances.

In 2007, the U.S. national rate of recycling for e-waste was only 10%. California’s rate was up to 17%, thanks to its 2004 Cell Phone Recycling Act.

Impacts and Issues

Recycling has limits as a way to reduce the environmental impact of industrialized society. Although most forms of recycling save energy compared to using virgin materials, manufacturing even with recycled materials does use energy. Re-using objects is an even more effective way to reduce harm to Earth. For example, containers can be collected and re-filled rather than being melted down for the manufacture of brand-new containers, and shopping bags can be brought back to the store for reuse rather than being thrown away or even recycled. Reducing how much is used is even more effective than recycling or re-using: that is, buying less stuff to begin with. This hierarchy or ladder of choices is often captured in the slogan “Reduce, Re-Use, Recycle.”

Re-using and reducing may involve adjustments in lifestyle that some people consider unpleasant, while others enjoy them. Recycling has the virtue that it requires minimal lifestyle change, so governments can pursue recycling programs without interfering with private consumption choices.

Does Recycling Make Sense?

Critics of recycling have argued that it is an inefficient practice, claiming there is plenty of room for landfills; all U.S. trash for the next 1,000 years, piled up a few hundred yards deep, could fit into a single 35-square-mi (91-square-km) landfill. In a frequently quoted essay first published in the New York Times Magazine in 1996, columnist John Tierney argued that “recycling could be America’s most wasteful activity.” While admitting that recycling saves energy, Tierney argued that “there are much more direct—and cheaper—ways to reduce pollution. Recycling is a messy way to try to help the environment.” Some critics of recycling, including those quoted by Tierney, have ideological objections to mandatory recycling because it could interfere with the “free market” approach; among these critics are the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, and the Waste Policy Center.

Such arguments have persuaded few governments at the city or national level, and public support for recycling, as measured by polls, has remained high. In defense of recycling, environmentalists, recycling industry representatives, and government scientists cite studies showing that recycling—when properly carried out—does save energy, reduce landfill costs, reduce pollution, and yield other benefits for the environment. Moreover, these benefits increase as a higher percentage of the waste stream is recycled and as recycling programs mature so that methods can be adjusted to achieve the greatest possible benefits. As for landfill space, saving on landfill space is one benefit of recycling, but its main environmental benefit is reducing the harm done by the mining, logging, refining, and manufacturing of virgin materials.

Poisonous Recycling

In the early 2000s, efforts to recycle e-waste were controversial because e-waste materials collected for recycling were often exported to India, China, and other developing countries, where they were recycled using methods that released large amounts of pollution and injured the health of workers and other people. For example, in China, computers from North American are often recycled using crude methods such as burning wiring in heaps to separate its valuable copper from its plastic insulation. The burning plastic releases clouds of toxic chemicals that find their way into people’s lungs and into water supplies. Dismantling circuit boards by hand releases lead dust; a 2008 study found that in some family workshops in China, lead levels were 2,800 times higher than those considered safe by normal industrial standards.

See Also Electronics Waste; Green Movement; Landfills; Waste Transfer and Dumping

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Lund, Herbert F. McGraw-Hill Recycling Handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 2000.

Periodicals

Barnard, Ann. “City Council Passes Bill for Recycling of Plastic Bags.” New York Times (January 10, 2008).

Barnard, Ann. “Green with Envy: Germany’s Green Dot Program Continues Generating Good Collection Numbers.” Recycling Today (October, 2004).

Fountain, John. “Recycling that Harms the Environment and People.” New York Times (April 15, 2008).

Tierney, John. “Recycling Is Garbage.” New York Times Magazine (June 30, 1996).

“The Truth about Recycling.” The Economist (June 7, 2007).

Web Sites

Container Recycling Institute. “Waste and Opportunity: U.S. Beverage Container Recycling Scorecard and Report.” http://www.container-recycling.org/assets/pdfs/reports/2006-scorecard.pdf (accessed May 9, 2008).

National Institutes of Health. “Help Secure Our Future: Recycle Around the Clock.” http://nems.nih.gov/outreach/factsheet_recycling.pdf (accessed May 9, 2008).

Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming: U.S. House of Representatives. “New National Bottle Bill Would Cut Heat-Trapping Emissions, Energy Needs” [press release]. http://globalwarming.house.gov/mediacenter/pressreleases?id=0126 (accessed May 9, 2008).

Larry Gilman