The world of recycling is fraught with myths and paradoxes.
Myth number one is that household recycling is essential to prevent resource depletion. In fact, of the materials we recycle - steel, aluminum, paper, glass and plastic - the majority of them are in no danger of running out in the near future.
Do you know why people recycle old newspaper? You may think to save precious trees. However, in actual the trees are a renewable resource, if they are replanted as quickly as they are chopped off and grown up in managed forests. On the other hand, carrying old newspapers to recycling plants makes use of non-renewable fossil fuel. So is it likely that recycling newspapers does harms more than good?
Paper is obtained from a renewable resource and glass is got from one of the most abundant materials on earth, sand.
Whereas Iron and Aluminum are considered the world’s two most abundant metals, simultaneously making up fourteen percent of the earth’s crust.
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Recycling is riddled with myths and paradoxes
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Well if we don’t recycle them they go to the landfill where they go to waste, take up space, and take a longer time to break down than if they were properly composted. We may have abundant and renewable resources for iron, glass, and paper, but we don’t have unlimited space to dump them once used.
Exactly what Marsha said!
Once inner-city landfill sites get full we will have to waste more energy transporting them to outer-city sites.
also...
’Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours — or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.’ - recycling-revolution.com
There are several flaws in these arguments. First, we recycle not because the materials we’re recycling are getting depleted. We recycle so that we don’t have to keep pulling fresh resources from the earth and letting usuable materials go to waste in landfills. Taking raw materials from the earth disrupts the local ecology. It’s also a lot less expensive and less costly in terms of energy to recycle glass, metal, and paper than it is to make them from raw materials.
Transporting used paper takes fossil fuel, yes, but so does cutting timber, moving fallen trees out by helicopters, dirigibles, winches, or trucks, and transporting logs from the logging sites by truck. I live in the middle of timber country and share the road with logging trucks all the time. They often have to haul logs a considerable distance to paper and lumber mills. Clear-cutting and road-building for logging also expose mountainsides to erosion.
As for trees being a renewable resource: when you remove the tree, you’re also removing all the biomass bound up in the tree, including many nutrients that the tree has taken up and stored. One thing that foresters are discovering is that there are only so many ”crops” that you can get from a forest before the nutrients and humus in the soil are depleted. Natural forests depend on the slow decay of fallen timber to replenish the humus and nutrients. While mineral nutrients could be replaced by fertilizers, the humus is a lot more difficult to replenish without all that fibrous, slow-decaying, lignin-rich wood. Erosion following clear-cuts, if the cuts aren’t managed welll, can intensify loss of topsoil and nutrients.