Keep Benton County Beautiful

There are many direct and indirect benefits associated with recycling. Virtually all of them will come under one of the big three categories: environmental, economic and energy. I like to call these the 3 E`s of recycling. Let`s take a closer at each one.

Environmental Benefits of Recycling

Reducing the amount of garbage that ends up in landfills every day is a direct and very obvious recycling benefit. Landfills take up a lot of space and produce methane gas which contributes to the greenhouse effect. Anything we can do to lessen the amount of material going to landfills is definitely a good thing. According to the National Recycling Coalition, solid waste recycling in the United States was responsible for preventing 32.9 million metric tons of carbon equivalents being released into the atmosphere in the year 2000. Recycling materials also reduces the amount of water pollution created during manufacturing as compared to raw material processing.

Energy Benefits

Manufacturing goods from raw materials requires a huge amount of energy. Using recycled materials significantly reduces energy consumption at the manufacturing level. Recycled aluminum cans are remanufactured into new products using just 5% of the energy that is needed when starting from scratch. Likewise paper products can be manufactured from recycled paper with a 70% energy savings over paper made from trees.

Economic Benefits of Recycling

Recycling creates a lot of jobs. The State of Pennsylvania reports over 52,000 recycling jobs with an annual payroll of $2.2 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money and clearly many families are deriving a living by their involvement in this industry. That’s only one state, but do the math – recycling is a major employer in the economy and it’s a growth industry. In fact the U.S. recycling industry is estimated to employ 1.1 million people and be more than $236 billion annually. Think of it this way – burning 10,000 tons of garbage takes one person, while it takes six people to process it at the landfill. However recycling that same amount of waste creates about 35 jobs!

So the next time you have to crush those milk cartons and flatten the cereal boxes keep these recycling benefits in mind and know what a good thing you are doing. It`s a great feeling to be putting out one garbage can each week for our family of five instead of the two cans that used to be there.