Stanford recycled, composted and otherwise reduced its waste by 62% and reduced landfills by 35%. There are many reasons why recycling is essential. Not only can it help reduce your carbon footprint, but it also helps reduce the need to harvest raw materials, saves energy, reduces greenhouse gases, prevents pollution, and more. Making products from recycled materials requires less energy than making them from new raw materials.
Much less energy is needed to manufacture products with recycled materials than with raw materials. For example, recycling a glass bottle saves enough energy to turn on a 100-watt bulb for four hours. Like recycling most materials, paper recycling saves energy, reduces greenhouse gases, and conserves crucial natural resources. In addition, the more paper is recycled, the less paper there is in landfills.
Since paper can be recycled, it's important to leave space in landfills for materials that can't be reused through recycling. Paper takes up space in landfills and is wasted because it can be efficiently recycled. Recycling is also crucial because of the way waste can affect animals (and, consequently, humans because, you know, the food chain). It can mean that instead of throwing away broken furniture, materials are recycled to produce something new.
Despite everything, a recycling facility means more jobs in the local community, which translates into more people with money to spend on local businesses and preserve the community's financial stability. Recycling solves this problem because recycling dumps less waste and saves valuable space. The question of time must also be taken into account, since it often takes less time to prepare recycled materials than to work with raw materials. By using recycled scrap as a material, 92 percent of energy is saved for aluminum, 90 percent for copper and 56 percent for steel.
In response to some of these challenges, the EPA has developed several products to help communities improve their recycling programs. Using recycled metal, also known as scrap metal, instead of “new metal” also reduces mining waste by 97 percent. Whichever way you look at it, the benefits of recycling are enough for all of us to make an effort. Buying recycled paper or glass products not only helps reduce the amount of waste produced, but it also helps promote the recycling industry.
Some of those benefits apply directly to those who decide it's worth the time and effort to recycle, while other benefits only begin to appear over time. The EPA reports that recycling actually helps create jobs in both the recycling and manufacturing industries in the United States. If you have to get it, buy something that can be used again and, if you get something that professionals need to recycle, put it in the recycling bin. If you're not throwing away any of your old products and instead using them for something new, you're actually recycling.
