Facts About How Recycling Is Good

Recycling is investing the materials from used products such as glass bottles, aluminum cans or plastic containers to create new products. Not only does recycling conserve natural resources, but it also helps save energy and stimulate the economy.

Conserves Natural Resources

• Recycling reduces the amount of nonrenewable, or irreplaceable, natural resources we tap into to make many modern convenience items. With the increase in the use of disposables, many natural resource reserves, such as crude oil and iron mines, will quickly be depleted if the materials are not recycled.

Saves Energy

• Although it does require energy to make products from recycled materials, the amount of energy used is significantly less than the amount required to make the products from scratch. For example, according to the Stanford University Recycling Center, producing aluminum cans from recycled aluminum only uses 5 percent of the amount of energy that it takes to produce the same amount of cans from unrefined aluminum, giving an energy saving of 95 percent.

Stimulates the Economy

• In the long run, recycling is an economically efficient practice. Although it does cost more to process recycled materials into finished products than it does to dump them in a landfill, the net cost after reselling the recycled goods is about one third that of landfilling. Also, the recycling process creates about ten jobs for every one job available in landfilling.