2011 August | Richard Kaloust Recycling Articles

Archive for August, 2011

Paper Recycling

To produce each week’s Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
	Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
	If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
	If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
	If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you’d get about 700 of them. A busy supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket can go through over 6 million paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are just in the United States!!!
	The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
	The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
	Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
	Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person.
	The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
	In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.
	Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!
	The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of carbon dioxide.
	The construction costs of a paper mill designed to use waste paper is 50 to 80% less than the cost of a mill using new pulp.

Big Recycling Bins Win Praise and Criticism

In recent months something new has been appearing on curbsides across St. Louis, and the changes give insight into larger trends across the country. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that large, 64-gallon bins are being deployed in a number of communities in the metro area in a single-stream recycling campaign that aims to improve recovery rates. However, some critics are bristling.

The big bins arrive at doorsteps with instructions to toss everything recyclable in there together, from plastics to paper and metal. There’s no question that the change is getting dramatic results. In Northwoods, the average monthly recycling rate per person has jumped to seven pounds in the year since the bins were deployed — up from an average of less than a pound.

In Olivette, the average monthly rate jumped to 19 pounds per person from 11 pounds per person after 64-gallon bins replaced the previous 18-gallon jobs.

The large bins are pretty pricey, clocking in at about $45 each wholesale. The switch, of course, also requires additional training of waste management workers and possibly new equipment and hires, something that doesn’t come free. American consumers, never quick to catch on to recycling, have to go through a period of adjustment and re-education to make sure things get handled properly.

In St. Louis, some families have already asked to opt out of recycling, versus wanting to pay any fees associated with it. That’s understandable in a time of economic downturn, but it still needs to be pointed out that recycling provides tremendous long-term goods to many, including creating jobs, saving landfill space and slashing our expenditures of energy, water and materials. Recycling is taking a strong step to preserving long-term economic and environmental health and security, especially for our children.

Do you really want to tell your children or grandchildren that the reason they can’t visit Disney World is because sea level rise has devastated Florida, and by not doing your part in paying pennies a month to recycle you contributed to more greenhouse gases? Anyway, stepping off the soapbox…

One of the biggest complaints experts have about single-stream recycling is that it renders too much collected material of substandard quality. Broken fragments of other items lodge into containers, making recovery and processing harder.

It’s unclear whether the best approach to increasing recycling is more education, access and lower cost, or more single-stream solutions. If people could get it together we wouldn’t need to have the single-stream debate.

I personally am on my third or fourth recycling bin in three years, on account of thieves in my neighborhood. (Though I do wonder what they do with the blue bins, especially since they are heavily labeled with my address in permanent marker). Luckily they only cost me $5 a pop (though the hours of pickup are very limited) — I shudder to think if they ran more than $45. Even so, I’d replace them each time anyway, because the benefits of recycling are hard to overstate.

One Million Beer Bottles Later and it’s a Buddhist Temple

recycled bottle temple Thai monks from the Sisaket province have used over one million recycled glass bottle to construct their Buddhist temple. Mindfulness is at the center of the Buddhist discipline and the dedication and thoughtfulness required to build everything from the toilets to their crematorium from recycled bottles shows what creativity and elbow grease can accomplish.

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The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple is about 400 miles northeast of Bangkok in the city of Khun Han close to the Cambodian border. Using Heineken bottles (green) and Chang Beer bottles (brown) the monks were able to clean up the local pollution and create a useful structure that will be a visual reminder to the scope of pollution and the potential we can make with limber minds.