After drinking their morning coffee from Starbucks, most Americans would often stop at the predicament of where to dispose of their plastic cup and their straw blue or brown bins? More often than not, people don't stop to think about whether they dispose of it in the right bin, because for them, the right thing to do is to get it disposed of. Those who aim for sustainability would think that they should put this cup at the recycling bin, but that is where they are wrong. A plastic cup does not have any room in the recycling process.
What people often overlook is the fact that recycling isn't just one process. There are two basic types of recycling -- single and multiple streams. Single stream recycling is the easier type of recycling that's why it's the most common type used in the US. Once the recycling bin is picked from your community, it is directed to a sorting plant where the items will be identified whether they will be directed to the landfill or the recycling plant.
But happens when people toss the wrong trash to the wrong bin? This is where the process of sorting becomes rough. Though sorting remains to be a difficult process, it is the most important. "The reason for this is simple. Thirty percent of those that are put in the recyclable bin shouldn't be there, to begin with," Jeremy Walters said, a community relations manager.
Paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, metal cans, and jugs are all separated at the opera-sorting stage. This is where the employee's sort through all the materials to make sure they don't contain anything that could cause damage to the machines, which may also cost thousands of dollars for repair alone. And then, the materials are separated by size.
"All recyclable materials go through a magnetic separator. All the residual material goes directly to the landfill," Walters explained.
People think that they are helping the world when they put everything they don't need into the recycle bin, but they don't realize that what they are doing may be hurting the environment more. For instance, an empty pasta sauce jar that remained unwashed could cause contamination to the other materials that may be recycled like cardboard and paper. Plastic shopping bags that are thought to be recyclable poses a greater risk as they could wrap around the machine that does the recycling and cause serious damage.
After all the sorting has been done, the materials are then sent to recycling plants mostly found in South East Asian Countries. China used to process an estimated 45% of the total amount of trash for recycling, so when it closed its doors, first world countries like the US had difficulty on the weight of the waste in their hands. Everyone began the need to learn how to sort their trash while others were busy trying to cuff the use of single-use plastic.
Good intentions of people to recycle may only be making the environment worse. Not only does it cost the environment, but it could mean much more work for the economy.
