Recycling

Recycling

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-04/national/36738686_1_materials-recovery-facility-recyclable-materials-polyethylene-terephthalate

As you throw a plastic bottle in a blue bin with arrow, you get a sense of happiness, as it feels good to recycle because you know you're helping the earth. Recycling one plastic bottle can save enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for six hours.  Recycling is very important but as the United States only recycles seven percent of all the plastic it consumes it does not seem as such an important thing to people. Everything that is plastic is technically recyclable, so that tiny number is pretty depressing to hear.  If it is said that recycling is easy then why is it so hard for us to do it?  Are Americans truly that lazy to maybe had to walk an extra step to put it in a blue or green bin with those three arrows on it? 

It is amazing to learn that if we were able to take every single pound of plastic used and turn it back into raw plastic for the next year, we would still need to produce another eleven million tons to suffice the worldwide demand.  It takes forty seven million barrels of oil to produce eleven million tons of plastic. That is a huge amount. To put things in perspective, imagine you are holding a water bottle in your hard.  In that water bottle, a quarter of the bottle is filled with oil.  That is how much oil it took to create that one water bottle. 

Unfortunately, for every six water bottles we use, only one makes it to the recycling bin. The rest are sent to landfills. Or, even worse, they end up as trash on the land and in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Plastic bottles take many hundreds of years to disintegrate.  The smartest thing people could do would be to reuse bottles.

In the article, it talks about what happens to an empty ketchup bottle. It first goes through the materials recovery facility. There, robots distinguish and separate the different materials that come through.  The robots push waste into the appropriate containers.  When the bottle is put with the plastics, it goes down a conveyor belt as another machine separates different types of plastics.  The problem with these machines though is that they can make mistakes so humans have to check to make sure that the correct plastics are put in the correct areas.  Another issue that comes up quite frequently is if the bottle contains lubricants, colorants, fillers, antioxidants and other additives then there is no possible way for the plastic to be returned to its original quality.