Each person in the UK uses about 15kg of glass a year. Bottle banks collected 180000 tonnes of glass in 1989 and overall 300000 tonnes of glass were recycled. However this way only 20% of the glass used. The rest was wasted in in landfill. Recycling saves a quarter of the energy used in glass making.
Household glass is easy to recycle. It can be melted down over again without losing its purity. Contaminates are removed and the glass is sent to processing plants where most gets turned back into bottles and jars. Some is also made into fibreglass or even used for road aggregate.
The average UK family throws away about 70 kg of plastics a year. The 3.5 million tonnes of plastic used in this country in 1989 included 2.5 million telephones, 5 million photographic film cassettes, 40 million clothes hangers and 2.5 million bottle crates. Only 5.7% was recycled. There is an 80% energy saving in recycled plastic. Plastic is more complicated, as there are many different types, each with different qualities. The plastics can be melted, moulded or shredded to create new products such as water pipes, street signs and recycling containers.
Garden or green waste goes to various sites across where it is turned into compost. This is then taken and used by local farmers where it makes a great soil conditioner reducing the need for artificial fertilizers.
We through away millions of pounds worth of textiles each year. Some is useful as secondhand clothing. Some old cloth makes wiping rags for industrial use, and some makes filling material for upholestry, bedding and roofing felt. Old woolen materials make dressing gowns, blankets and furnishings. Cotton wastes make high quality paper. Items in good condition are sent via charity organisations to those who need them in the Less Economically Developed Countries (LEDC). Items of poorer quality are reprocessed into items like cleaning clothes and insulation material.
Compost
You can convert 20% or more domestic waste into compost. This includes vegetable and fruit peelings, egg shells, tea bags, tissues, paper bags, kitchen paper and shredded newspaper. You should avoid meat and fish, which smell and starchy foods, which atract rats and flies, but grass cuttings, leaves and weeds are fine.
Why should we recycle?
• Recycling uses less energy and resources than making things new.
• The raw materials for glass - sand, soda and lime - all have to be dug from the Earth.
They are then melted together at 1500ºC. This takes a lot of energy.
• Supplies of these raw materials and oil for energy will not last forever, so it is important to save them.
• Bottles and jars are collected for recycling.
The glass is broken into small pieces and melted
down. Melting glass that has already been made
is much easier than melting the raw materials.
• Every tonne of glass that is recycled saves
1.2 tonnes of raw materials and the equivalent of
136 litres of oil energy.
• Glass is not biodegradable, so the glass that we throw away will last forever, using up
valuable space.
What can we recycle?
Nearly everything we use can be recycled:
Food and garden waste
Instead of sending food and garden waste to landfill sites where it goes smelly and makes
the dangerous gas methane, turn it into compost for your garden!
Glass
Glass is 100% recyclable. It can be re-melted and re-used over and over again.
Plastic bottles
Most plastics can be recycled, look for the recycle symbol.
Paper and cardboard
Recycling paper and cardboard saves trees! Most
newspapers are made with at least 50% recycled paper.
Drinks cans
Food and drink cans are either made of aluminium or steel.
Both types can be recycled.
Textiles
Clothes, sheets, blankets and shoes can all be recycled.
Materials can be shredded and the fibres made into new
fabrics.
At the moment, in the UK we only recycle around 12% of our household rubbish.
Aluminium
• Aluminium is valuable. The recyclable aluminium in the UK is worth £40 million.
• A recycled aluminium can saves enough energy to run a television for three hours.
Glass
• 14 million glass bottles and jars are thrown away every day in England and Wales.
• When one glass bottle is recycled, the energy saved could light a 100W bulb for four hours.
Paper
• A tonne of recycled paper saves 17 trees, 2.3 cubic metres of landfill space, 32,000 litres of water, 4200kWh of electricity (enough to heat an average house for 6 months), and 27kg of air pollutants.
Plastic
• At the moment around 3%, of our plastic is recycled.
• Recycling a plastic bottle saves enough energy to light a 60W lightbulb for six hours.
• Recycled plastic is used for making insulation. Five 2-litre recycled bottles provide
enough padding for a ski jacket.
Steel
• The average person in the UK uses 240 cans each year. Only a quarter of these are
recycled.
• Recycling one tonne of steel saves 1.5 tonnes of iron ore and 0.5 tonnes coal, and
75% of the energy needed to make new steel.
?
These are the six items that Oxfordshire County Council will allow you to recycle.
My report is going to be on the recycling of Paper
Paper recycling is the process of recovering waste and remaking it into new paper products. There are three categories of paper that can be used as feedstocks for making recycled paper: mill broke, pre-consumer waste, and post-consumer waste.
Mill broke is paper trimmings and other paper scrap from the manufacture of paper, and is recycled internally in a . Pre-consumer waste is material that was discarded before it was ready for consumer use. Post-consumer waste is material that was discarded after actually being used by a consumer. Paper suitable for recycling is called "scrap paper".
Paper
- If you recycle the paper more than 7 times, the fibres simply fall apart.
- When recycling paper it loses fibres, so they add in Corn Starch for recycling process.
- You can burn paper, and get energy from it without causing too much pollution.
Information gathered from a video – ‘’the science of recycling’’.
Recycling processes include the following steps:
- Pulping: Adding water and applying mechanical action to separate fibers from each other.
- Screening: Using screens, with either slots or holes, to remove contaminants that are larger than pulp fibers.
- Centrifugal cleaning: Spinning the pulp slurry in cleaner causes materials that are more dense than pulp fibers to move outward and be rejected.
- Flotation: Passing air bubbles through the pulp slurry, with a surfactant present, causes ink particles to collect with the foam on the surface. By removing contaminated foam, pulp is made brighter. This step is sometimes called deinking.
- Kneading or dispersion: Mechanical action is applied to fragment contaminant particles.
- Washing: Small particles are removed by passing water through the pulp.
-
Bleaching: If white paper is desired, uses or to remove color from the pulp.
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Papermaking: The clean (and/or bleached) fiber is made into a "new" paper product in the same way that virgin is made.
-
: Process water is cleaned for reuse.
- Waste disposal: The unusable material left over, mainly ink, plastics, filler and short fibers, is called sludge. The sludge is buried in a landfill, burned to create energy at the paper mill or used as a fertilizer by local farmers.
How Paper is Recycled?
1* First, the waste paper must be collected. One of the most expensive parts of recycling is the collection, sorting, and transportation of waste paper.
2* The next step is repulping. The bales of sorted waste paper are soaked in large vats, where they disintegrate into fibers.
3* Chemicals are added at this point so that, when ink particles start to separate from the paper, they can't reattach themselves to the pulp.
To remove the ink, the pulp is fed into a deinking system.
*First, a series of increasingly fine screens remove extraneous material (known as "trash"), coatings and additives, and extremely small contaminants such as fillers and loose ink particles.
*The screened pulp is sent through several cleaning stages, where heat, chemicals, and mechanical action may be used to loosen ink particles.
*Finally, the pulp mixture enters a flotation device, where calcium soap and other chemicals are added. Air bubbles in the mixture float the remaining ink to the surface, where it is skimmed away.
4* The deinked pulp is now sent to the stock preparation area, where it is treated and loaded into the headbox of a paper machine. From this point, the pulp is treated just the same as if it had been freshly made from wood chips rather than recycled.
5* At the end of the recycling process, a new paper product has been produced from material that might otherwise have been dumped in a landfill. Recycling is an important way for consumers and papermakers to work together for a cleaner environment.
Domestic waste contains a mixture of materials, with typical composition by weight in the United Kingdom at present being 33.2 per cent paper.
How can you help in Recycling?
You can help by presorting your household waste, by separating newspapers, for example, from magazines. It is also important to keep the paper out of rain and sunlight, because exposure to the elements makes it harder to remove the ink from the paper.Most synthetic plastics are not environmentally degradable; unlike paper, they do not rot or otherwise break down over time. (Some degradable plastics have been developed, but none has proved compatible with the conditions required for most waste landfills.) Thus, there is an environmental problem associated with the disposal of plastics. Recycling has emerged as the most practical method to deal with this problem. So why don’t you try to decrease the use of plastics? Use paper products instead, like paper bags for example.