Sustainability Matters: Recycling

As a social venture with an environmental purpose, we believe in recycling. Since recycling reduces the need for companies to harvest new raw materials, it reduces the amount of pollution that factories produce when processing raw materials. This helps to cut back on air pollution and water pollution, and to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Manufacturers can cut air pollution by 73 percent and water pollution by 35 percent, according to the University of Central Oklahoma. Recycling also helps companies save money on manufacturing new plastic products from petroleum, and save money on mining and extraction costs. Recycling also helps significantly reduce the amount of waste that gets sent to landfills. When companies recycle plastic bottles, they can save up to 60 percent of the costs to produce new bottles. Also, if the whole world doubled the amount of aluminum it recycles, then we would keep more than a million tons of pollutants out of the atmosphere.

Now, recycling isn’t as simple as throwing all your recyclables into a bin and letting your recycling collector pick it up. So-called “single stream recycling”, or throwing all the recyclables into one bin without having to separate them, is convenient, but it results in less material actually being recycled. Roughly 25 percent of what we try to recycle is too contaminated to be able to be recycled, according to the National Waste and Recycling Association.

There are some ways to try to make sure your recycling is more likely to get recycled, even if you use a single-stream system. This resource goes into detail about what the best ways to do this are. There are several key steps. First, learn the rules for what materials your local recycling program will and won’t accept. The best way to do this is to actually call your city’s information hotline to ask them which materials they are and aren’t able to recycle. Second, be sure to rinse food residue off of your containers. There’s no need to wash it with warm water and soap; a cold rinse will do. Rinsing your containers will prevent food residue from getting onto paper products and making the paper harder to recycle. Third, try to break apart cardboard boxes before putting them in the recycle bin. It’s harder for machines to process boxes that haven’t been broken down. Break boxes apart, pull off the tape, and break them down into pieces that aren’t any bigger than a standard sheet of paper. Finally, try to consume less, and to reuse more of your empty containers. Unfortunately, much of the contamination isn’t caused by us directly, but by companies who design their products in such a way that they’re more visually appealing (and therefore sell better), but are often harder to recycle. For this reason, reducing and reusing are more important than recycling.

Recycling can often be tricky, but if you follow the advice above, then you will help ensure that more of your items will be recycled. Reducing, reusing, and recycling matter for both the planet and its people!

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