The Industrial Age and Recycling
The mass production of the industrial age is, in many ways, the very reason we need to worry about large-scale recycling. When products can be produced (and purchased) very cheaply, it often makes more economic sense to simply throw away old items and purchase brand new ones. However, this culture of disposable goods created a number of environmental problems.
In the 1930s and 40s, conservation and recycling became important in American society and in many other parts of the world. Economic depressions made recycling a necessity for many people to survive, as they couldn’t afford new goods. In the 1940s, goods such as nylon, rubber, and many metals were rationed and recycled to help support the war effort. However, the economic boom of the postwar years caused conservationism to fade from the American consciousness [source: Hall]. It wasn’t until the environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s, heralded by the first Earth Day in 1970, that recycling once again became a mainstream idea. Though recycling suffered some lean years due to public acceptance and the market for recycled goods not growing it has generally increased from year to year [source: Hall] The success of recycling traces to wide public acceptance, the improved economics of recycling, and laws requiring recycling collections or enforcing recycled content in certain manufacturing processes.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the main reasons for recycling is to reduce the amount of garbage sent to landfills. Landfill usage peaked in the 1980s, when Americans sent almost 150 million tons (136.08 million metric tons) of garbage to landfills each year. Today, we still dump more than 100 million tons (90.719 million metric tons) of trash into landfills annually [source: Hall]. Even though modern sanitary landfills are safer and less of a nuisance than the open dumps of the past, no one likes having a landfill around. In heavily populated areas, landfill space is scarce. Where space is plentiful, filling it with garbage isn’t a very good solution to the problem. Today, recycling efforts in the United States divert 32% of waste away from landfills. That prevents more than 60 million tons (54.432 million metric tons) of garbage from ending up in landfills every year.
Landfills cause another problem in addition to taking up lots of space. The assortment of chemicals thrown into landfills, plus the chemicals that result when garbage breaks down and blends into a toxic soup known as leachate, creates huge amounts of pollution. Leachate can drain out of the landfill and contaminate groundwater supplies. Today, impermeable clay caps and plastic sheeting prevent much of this runoff, making the landfills much safer than they were just a few decades ago. Still, any leachate is too much if it's draining into your neighborhood.
Making a brand-new product without any recycled material causes natural resources to deplete in the manufacturing process. Paper uses wood pulp from trees, while the manufacture of plastics requires the use of fossil fuels like oil and natural gas. Making something from recycled materials means using fewer natural resources.
There’s room for debate on this aspect of recycling, but many recycling processes require less energy than it would take to manufacture the same item brand-new. Manufacturing plastic is very inexpensive, and some plastic goods can be difficult to recycle efficiently. In those cases, the recycling process probably takes more energy. It can also be difficult to weigh all the energy costs along the entire chain of production. Recycling steel certainly uses less energy than the entire process of mining iron ore, refining it, and forging new steel. Some contend that the fleet of recycling trucks collecting plastic and paper door to door every week in cities across the United States tips the balance of energy out of recycling’s favor. Energy use is a factor weighed on a case-by-case basis.
Recycling Saves Energy
- Energy savings are an important environmental benefit of recycling.
- Most energy production involves the consumption of fossil fuels and usually produces emissions of air and water pollutants.
- The steps in supplying recycled materials to industry (including collection, processing, and transportation) typically use less energy than the steps in supplying virgin materials to industry (including extraction, refining, transporting, and processing).
- Additional energy savings associated with recycling accrue in the manufacturing process itself.
- It requires less energy to manufacture products from recycled materials than from raw materials.
- In 2005, recycling of municipal solid waste in America reduced manufacturing energy use by more than 988,489,000 million BTUs, enough energy to power 10,721,139 homes.