Recycling

Post-consumer vs pre-consumer waste: Pre-consumer is excess material produced during manufacturing. Post-consumer is material that was sold, used, collected, and recycled.

The number of curbside recycling programs has grown 500 percent over the past 5 years. Recycling is now helping to recover more than one quarter of all waste generated in the United States.

Over the last 10 years, the city of Austin has recycled ~29% of trash, ~17% recycling and 11% yard trimmings. This has not significantly changed over the last 10 years.

Each year Austin produces ~ 1.13 tons of trash per household 0.82 tons goes to landfills (1,640 lbs.) tons is recycled (370 lbs)

Recycling can help create jobs

Jobs with decent salaries

Job creation by type of recycling

#1 #2 #1 #3 #4 #5 #6 $$ $ $

m Manufacturing cans from recycled aluminum produces 96% less air & water pollution than manufacturing cans from raw material (bauxite).

* Making Aluminium cans from old ones uses one twelfth of the energy to make them from raw materials. * For glass bottles, 315kg of CO2 is saved per ton of glass recycled after taking into account transportation and processing

Recycling a four-foot stack of newspaper produces as much paper pulp as a 40- foot pine tree. Manufacturing recycled paper produces 55% less air and water pollution than manufacturing paper from virgin wood. m

Recycling your daily newspaper for one year would provide the pulp equivalent of 2/3 acre of commercial forest. Recycling one ton of newspaper saves 17 pine trees. About 600 pines trees are saved each day by Austin's recycling efforts. m

Cost: Paper- using virgin material is long established and the equipment and methods are paid for, Recycling is newer and requires new capital to get started.

Cost: Paper- recycled paper costs include diverting and sorting trash, and no cost offset for saved water/energy. Disposal is not considered in the cost of virgin paper. Virgin paper benefits from some subsidies and tax breaks.

Toilet paper, fluffy = trees.

tissue from 100 percent recycled fibers makes up less than 2 percent of sales for at-home use among conventional and premium brands 25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in the U.S. comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests

Landfills are becoming more expensive...

It still costs more to recycle paper, plastic, metal and glass in New York City than to simply chuck everything into the trash. But the cost difference has narrowed, and if the trend continues, recycling could end up being cheaper than trash disposal within five years... In NY city Recycling costs the city $284 a ton, while curbside trash disposal comes to $267 a ton

Packaging creates most of the plastic waste

Most recycled plastic is used to make “other” products... plastic “wood”, textiles, etc. Recycled plastic greenwashes plastic use, increasing the acceptance of plastic and only temporarily diverting the plastic from disposal.

Why can't you recycle plastic bottle caps? (We did not listen to this in class, and I will not ask about this particular issue on the exam. I left the slide in the presentation, in case you are interested, then you can have a listen.)

Recycling