The Process Of Recycling

The Process Of Recycling

Recycling was first thought of in 1776 during the war of Independence from England. Americans recycled scrap metals to help fight the war. But it wasn?t until 1895 when the first residential waste program in the U.S. was invented in New York. The chemistry behind recycling is the idea that 'everything circulates'. For instance, if you saved a box of cereal and put it into your recycling bin, that box of cereal can be made into a package of papers, or a newspaper, or a tissue box, and the possibilities are endless. Common household items that are recycled are newspapers and paper towels, aluminum, plastic, glass soft drink containers, steel cans, and plastic laundry detergent bottles.

The process of recycling can be broken down into three steps. The first step is 'collection and processing'. In this step one would look for items to recycle, they can be found on curbsides, drop-off centers, buy-back centers, and deposit/ refund centers. These items are then sorted, cleaned, and prepared into marketable commodities for manufacturing at a materials recovery facility. In the second step, the ?manufacturing? step, the recyclables are then manufactured into new items containing either total or partial recycled content. The ?purchasing recycled products? step is the last. This step completes the ?circle? of recycling, where consumers but the recycled items.

The whole purpose of recycling is to reuse items to reduce the...