Recycling

In one year, our appetite for plastic products cost us nearly ONE BILLION BARRELS of petroleum. (How to Make the World a Better Place).
"Every year nearly 900,000,000 trees are cut down for American paper and pulp mills" (Business Statistics)
"Americans throw away enough aluminum every three months to rebuid our entire commercial air fleet." (Recycler's Handbook)
29% of the timber we cut goes directly to making paper. (http://www.earthisland.org/paper/woodfact.html))

Seems to good to be true, but there is one simple thing you can do to lower those numbers - RECYCLE!

Recycling is Easy

As students at Virginia Tech, we are fortunate to have a convenient and effective recycling program. Bins can be found throughout the dorms and academic buildings, and there are large drop-offs behind each dining hall on campus. (See http://www.vt.edu:10021/vtrecycle for more information).

And now its even Easier!

We can now throw all our glass, aluminum, and steel containers in the same recycling bin!

(We still need to keep paper separate from containers.)

Remember:

Remove bottle tops
Rinse all containers (when possible)
Follow the standard guidelines for each item
Do not deposit trash or other items in the bins.

Recycling reduces environmental impact -

Conserving Natural Resources	By re-using our waste, we don't need to extract and refine as much raw material. This reduces the invasion of virgin land, whether it's oil being extracted for plastic products or trees being cut down for paper.
Reducing Pollution	Every ton of new glass produces 27.8 pounds of air pollution, while recycling glass reduces that amount by up to 20%. Recycling aluminum produces 95% less sulfur dioxide than non-recycled aluminum. (Recycler's Handbook)

Efficiency

Most of the products we use go through many manufacturing steps - trees must be pulped, oil must be extracted, and metals must be refined. In most cases, recycling greatly simplifes this process: paper is easier to pulp than trees, processing aluminum cans require 95% less energy than bauxite, and recyclable plastics are ready to be melted into new products. This efficiency saves energy, reduces pollution, and in most cases makes recycling cheaper than the alternatives.

Recycling a ton of paper "saves 7,000 gallons of water and 60 pounds of air-polluting effluents, 4100kwh of energy" (not to mention trees, landfill space, and disposal costs). (The Recycler's Handbook)
"Energy savings [from recycling aluminum] in 1993 alone were enough to light a city the size of Pittsburg for six years" (The Can Manufacturers Insttute).

Recycling Saves Money -

For production-plants of similar size, making recycled products is cheaper than doing all the extracting, hauling, and processing of raw materials.

"Since the early 1970s, Americans have earned $6.4 billion from their recycling of aluminum cans." The Can Manufacturer's Institute

At Tech, we see another savings - by recycling, we not only make money from selling aluminum, plastic, and white paper, we also offset the cost of waste disposal:

In January, $4,751 worth of aluminum, glass, plastic, paper, and cardboard was recycled by Tech students like you.

If recycling is so much cost-effective and efficient than using virgin material, why are recycled products more expensive?

In most cases - economics of scale: The small size of current recycling operations prevents them from enjoying the cost-reduction benefits of mass production. As we buy more recycled products, the recycling industry will grow, and most recycled product prices will drop below virgin product prices.