The Benefits Of Recycling

Trash. Trash mostly comes from food products and is extremely common in our world. Some trash can be recycled where it will be reused instead of going into landfills, but some garbage just physically can't. Recycling helps prevent the amount of waste thrown into landfills and overall helps cleanse our earth. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) constantly urges the community to recycle as much as they can, but in the end it's the people's choice on whether recycling happens or not. Many things can be recycled, but plastic water bottles are by far the most common option. Though water bottles seem very simple, they actually go through a quite complicated creation process. The manufacturing process all starts with polyethylene terephthalate,

The bottles that are sent to recycling go through an interesting process to get reused. After you place your bottle in a recycling bin, the bottles are collected and sorted at a MRF, a material recovery facility. Here the bottles are sorted, separated and situated into bundles, each scaling up to 1200 pounds and some consisting of more than 7200 bottles. These bundles are then transported to a facility that rips them apart using a machine known as a bale breaker. A magnet is also used to discard certain metal bits that may have mistakenly come along the journey. The bottles are then put through a cleaning machine that uses soapy water to remove the labels and dirt. Bottles and caps are then separated based on types of plastic using a quite efficient method. The PET bottles and their caps are then cut into small flakes and placed in water. Since different types of plastic have different densities, the bottle flakes sink, while the caps float, which separates them for recycling. The dried plastic flakes of bottles and caps are then warmed into a gooey liquid and forced out into long strands. The strands are cooled and toughened in water, and chopped into tiny pea-sized pellets, which are transported to companies that make a variety of new plastic