Recycling

Every day Americans buy 62 million newspapers and throw away 44 million of them. That’s like dumping hallf a million trees into a landfill every week! The trees that were chopped down to make new paper can no longer make oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, or provide a habitat for thousands of species.

Every month Americans throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill a giant skyscraper! All this glass is recyclable! All this glass takes up space in landfills. And this glass will take 4,000 years or more to decompose!

Every year more than 100 million cell phones and millions of personal computers are tossed out in the United States. Because these products contain lead, and other hazardous materials, this trash leaks into our environment and threatens human and animal health.

32 billion pounds of plastic is used per year in the United States…and a mere 2% of it is recycled! Recycling this plastic would reduce the volume of waste going into landfills and reduce the amount of oil and energy consumed to produce new plastic energy consumed to make Instead, the plastic sits in landfills where it could take up to 450 years to decompose!

Gregg Varner, Director of Charleston County Solid Waste told us, “Here in Charleston County, half the waste is burned to make steam and electricity. The remaining ash, which is a clean, inert substance actually goes to a landfill.”

We were fortunate enough to get an action-packed tour of the Charleston Solid Waste Recycling facility from Jenny Bloom, their Education Coordinator. With Jenny we followed recycling material through trucking, weighing, sorting, more sorting, squishing and squashing, processing, and packaging into bales. Whew! There was lots of action, lots of noise, and lots of learning. We’ll never look at a glass or plastic bottle, an aluminum can, or paper or cardboard the same way again!

Jenny reminded us that whenever we discard something, we’re not getting rid of it. We’re just moving it around the planet. It may be incinerated, burned, or take on a different form such as ash and steam, but it is still “stuff”, and it still affects our planet. When plastic is recycled for example, it doesn’t disappear, it just becomes different “stuff.” So Jenny urged us to think about what we buy—do we really need it—or will it just become more stuff to move around the planet? Jenny pointed out that many recycling plants (Charleston County included) still do not recycle batteries, so she urged us to select rechargeable batteries, or better yet, items like calculators that are solar powered.

Each recycling facility handles electronic items, car batteries, fluorescent light bulbs, motor oil and hazardous wastes in their own way. Check with your local recycler and see what they accept.

Trucks are weighed as they arrive at the plant and they then drop off their load of comingled recycling—that is all the glass, aluminum, plastic that is in the truck. The truck then goes back to be re-weighed and then drops off all the paper in the load.

Then the sorting begins!

80 tons of recycling are delivered to Charleston Solid waste each day. (Your town may process even more!) And every ounce of this material is hand-sorted! The recycling travels up a conveyer belt and different types of plastic are picked off first by the conscientious, hard-working employees.

Metal and aluminum continue down the line where a giant magnet lifts all the metal cans off. Further down the conveyor belt, the aluminum is pushed off by a reverse polarized magnet and sent to a compactor for crushing. The glass is sorted into 4 piles:  trash glass, clear glass, brown glass, and green glass. Notice that all the labels are still on—that’s ok—labels are no problem. Before you recycle though, rinse your bottles and remove the caps or tops. Caps and tops are made of a different material and will contaminate the glass load. The glass may be accepted, but your recycling plant will get paid less money for it.

Recycled glass is then sold to make new glass bottles, roads and highways, and even tiny particles used in sandblasting! Instead of piling up in the landfill, the glass can be used over and over and over again!  The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can power a 100-watt light bulb for four hours or a television for three hours! Recycling glass causes 20% les air pollution and 50% less water pollution than making a new glass bottle from raw materials! What a difference you can make…just by recycling your glass bottles!

Now imagine what you can do by recycling all your plastic! Americans throw away 25 million plastic beverage bottles every hour! On the bottom of most plastic containers is a recycle symbol (three arrows forming a triangle) with a number inside. That number tells you what type of plastic it is. Charleston County accepts #1 known as PET and #2 known as HDPE plastic. Your recycling plant may accept other numbers as well—have your teacher or your parents check it out!

The mountains of plastic here are sold in bales to remake into plastic bottles, carpet, polar fleece, ecospun fabrics, and many other items. Then there’s the HDPE--#2, the heavier molded plastic found in laundry soap container and plastic coffee cans. The HDPE comes in clear and mixed colors.

Jenny said “Remember, plastic is made from a non-renewable resource—fossil fuel, so we want to make sure people recycle plastic.
Four hundred and fifty years in a landfill is a very long time!

If all of our newspapers were recycled, we could save about 250 million trees each year! That’s a lot of trees! At Charleston County Recycling, office and school paper, junk mail, magazines, newspapers, even paper board and corrugated cardboard are recycled. Corrugated cardboard takes up lots and lots of space in landfills, so if your town recycles corrugated cardboard, help them out—don’t throw it in the trash!

Approximately a year ago, Charleston County started recycling paper board – cereal and tissue boxes, cookie boxes, any boxes and packaging that do not have the waffling of corrugated cardboard.  Jenny said “Here at Charleston Solid Waste, we absolutely love paper board. One of the reasons we love it –it’s thinner and more flexible—we have lots of companies that buy it. It’s used for the insulation of walls—the outside of pencils..”

Jenny stressed that they only accept clean paperboard – paper board that is greasy or has food residue on it is not acceptable – it attracts pests like mice and bugs and taints a load. Pizza boxes are not paper board—orange juice containers because they are coated with wax are not paper board. The more paper and paper board we recycle, the healthier our environment will be: Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the United States!

And by recycling aluminum cans, we really CAN make a difference! During the time it takes you to listen to this sentence, 50,000 aluminum beverage cans have been made. Once an aluminum can is recycled, it can be part of a new can within 6 weeks! And there is no limit to the number of times an aluminum can can be recycled!  These aluminum cans might become the aluminum siding of a house, car body, airplane body…or more can. Because so many of them are recycled, aluminum cans account for less than 1% of the total United States waste.

With every plastic or glass container you recycle, every aluminum or metal can, every piece of paper board or corrugated card board you recycle, you can make a difference—after all, it’s your planet too!