Reading the headline above, you might think the topic is kind of a no-brainer. Considering that the United States generates approximately 230 million tons of trash per year and only about one-fourth of it is recycled, there’s a lot of waste going into landfills or getting incinerated. Incineration can cause air pollution. Burying garbage in a landfill not only takes up precious space and pollutes the ground, it creates a potential threat to polluting waterways and aquifers. As we all know, many materials (such as plastics), can take hundreds, even thousands of years to breakdown, and we just don’t have that kind of time.

So obviously, Recycling as much as possible to keep waste from going to incinerators or landfills is going to be a far better alternative for the environment. However, if you delve a little deeper into the benefits of recycling, there are also a number of other reasons recycling is important to the health of our planet.

To create a product or packaging, raw materials must be used and manipulated. Take aluminum, for example. Even though it is one of the most common elements found within the Earth’s crust, it needs to be mined, extracted from the raw material that contains it (most frequently, bauxite), then needs to be refined and processed. In many cases, the extraction process creates a “red mud” that is toxic and must be stored in ponds until it stabilizes.

When you recycle aluminum, there is some energy used in the transportation and refinement process, but it’s far less compared to what would be used to mine the ore from scratch. It also eliminates the potential environmental impact that can be created by the extraction process. And that’s just one small part of a vast array of items that can and should be recycled.

Bay Disposal & Recycling is committed to protecting the environment through our recycling efforts and everything else we do. We firmly believe that by educating people about the benefits of recycling, we can all make a positive change together when it comes to protecting the environment, preserving our natural resources, and minimizing the strain on landfills. We invite you to join us in our efforts.

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