What Happens to the Recycled Items in the Recycling Bins?

Recycling facility

Recycling household items reduces the amount of solid waste in landfills and helps protect the environment. One of the greatest benefits of recycling is that it's relatively easy for the consumer. Colorful recycling bins make sorting items easy enough for a child to perform. Once the items are placed curbside, transport vehicles take the items to a designated recycling facility.

Identification

Recycling turns waste products back into usable forms. Many of the products people use on a regular basis can be broken down into simpler forms and reprocessed. This reduces the amount of solid waste left to decompose in landfills and preserves valuable resources. Most local municipalities run recycling programs that provide homeowners with recycling bins for easy sorting and collection. These bins usually collect plastic, glass, aluminum cans and paper.The contents of these bins are picked up regularly and transported to a central facility, where they are properly broken down and recycled.

Plastics

Environment-Green estimates that recycling just one plastic bottle shaves off anywhere from 100 to 1,000 years in a landfill. The recycling website also concludes that for every ton of plastic recycled, one ton of oil is saved. Plastics are relatively simple to recycle. Each product is made from a particular type of plastic resin that can be grouped together for recycling. Once the plastics leave the curbside bins, they are shipped to a reprocessing plant. There they are separated by type and broken into simpler forms. Plastics can be broken into smaller reusable chips or melted down. The plastic is then remolded into new products based on the chemical composition of the source resin.

Glass

Glass can take 4,000 years to decompose, and not all glass products can be mixed together for the purpose of recycling. However, once the glass is collected curbside, it all goes to a recycling facility where the different types are broken down and separated. A mechanical process smashes the glass into small pieces called cullet. Facilities use a system of magnets and screens to separate the glass cullet from other bits of scrap metal and plastic. The glass cullet is then combined with silica and limestone. Next, the blend is melted down to molten glass, which can be hardened into new consumer products.

Scrap Aluminum

The aluminum cans picked up by curbside collectors is included with other scrap metals once they reach a recycling facility. The aluminum cans are shredded into strips or broken into smaller chunks before being melted in a smelter. The resulting ingots of metal are transported to manufacturing plants, where they are rolled back into thin sheets. These sheets of aluminum can be formed back into cans or larger products like automobile parts. A recycling resource published by the city of Gainesville touts aluminum as "the biggest energy saver of all, saving 64,300-kilowatt hours per ton of reclaimed material."

Newspaper

Once newspapers are picked up by recycling collectors, they are combined with other paper products. These are sold to paper dealers who make contractual bids for long-term recycling projects. At the recycling center, a chemical wash separates colored ink from the actual paper material. The paper is mashed into a pulp and the ink is wrung out like a sponge. Any additional contaminants, such as dirt and loose binding, are then sifted out using screens. Remanufacturers add wood chips to the pulp before flattening out a new roll of fresh paper.

References

• University of Oregon: The Recycling Process
• Environment-Green: Recycling Facts and Benefits
• City of Gainesville: Recycling Process

Resources

• Environmental Protection Agency: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle