Richard Kaloust Recycling Articles

Shanghai Airport’s Brilliantly Simple Lighter Recycling System

china airport free lighters

China has a booming air travel industry and 350 million smokers. That means a lot of lighters get confiscated at security checkpoints.

At Pudong International Airport in Shanghai, instead of trashing the lighters confiscated from departing passengers, they’re provided for free to arriving passengers. It’s a brilliantly simple way of preventing a lot of plastic from ending up in the trash (and saving people a little cash).

Here in the states some airports sell confiscated items on Ebay or donate them to the homeless, but I’ve never seen this much simpler tactic employed. Would it work with shampoo, too, or are there hygiene issues?

THE EASIER RECYCLING GETS, THE MORE LIKELY THE INDUSTRY WILL COLLAPSE

How convenient is it to have a giant 55 gallon bin to throw all of your recycling in to without the need to sort it?

It’s very nice indeed. I have one and love it. But that convenience might actually be destroying the U.S. recycling industry.

This one giant bin method of recycling is called single stream recycling. While this method’s widespread implementation has helped lead to dramatic increases in recycling program participation, it has also led to the rise of the recycling industry’s biggest problem.

Contamination.

Take pizza boxes, for example. Pizza boxes do sport the universal recycling symbol on the bottom, but once they’re used the grease and melted cheese from the pizza itself renders them unrecyclable. The oil causes great problems for the quality of the paper, especially the binding of the fibers.

Before the rise of single stream recycling, this contamination would only affect the other cardboard and paper in the bin. But with single stream recycling the grease has the potential to contaminate the plastics, aluminum, and other material found in the giant bin.

Food matter contamination causes a serious problem for recyclers. In the case of FutureMark Paper, which manufactures recycled paper for publications such as Every Day with Rachael Ray and Outside Magazine, was forced to shut down part of its production line after food-contaminated paper caused a bacterial bloom in its waste paper cleaning equipment.

Recycling companies don’t have the resources to take such painstaking measures in sorting out unrinsed containers or grease stained pizza boxes…but Chinese recycling companies can. In fact, China now buys 70% of the United States’ waste paper.

Some experts even claim that waste paper is our number one export, by pound, to China.

Unfortunately China’s willingness to purchase the waste paper and pay for secondary sorting provides little incentive for recycling collectors to keep cleanliness standards high. This eventually results in higher prices for recycled content products and a shortage of materials domestically.

What can you do to help?

1. Minimize food contaminants. Throw away food-contaminated paper containers (fast food wrappers, pizza boxes), wash out jars and cans and take the lids off bottles and containers before putting them in your recycling bin.

2. Ask for and buy recycled products. The most effective way to promote a green recycling economy is to grow demand for recycled goods. Generally, recycled goods are less resource-intensive to produce than their non-recycled counterparts. For example, in the case of paper, organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund report that recycled paper takes far less water, energy and chemicals to make than paper made from wood pulp.

3. Support community recycling drives (or organize one for your favorite cause). Recyclables such as aluminum and newspaper are worth money. Many civic organizations, schools and other community groups are sponsoring collection drives for recyclable materials as fund-raisers for their organizations or for charitable causes. Whether they’re asking for Caprisun packets or old magazines, try to support these local recycling drives. They not only provide valuable fund-raising opportunities for neighborhood organizations, they also provide a cleaner supply of recyclable material to manufacturers.

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.