Keep Benton County Beautiful

Recycling has become an important part of our everyday lives. From the individual to small and large businesses we are recycling more types and quantities of materials all the time. As we worry about our natural resources and how to conserve them we naturally turn to recycling to aid us in this endeavor.

There can be great profits in recycling as well as conservation of the earth’s supply of resources. Metal recycling has been popular for a long time and includes categories to cover any type of metal imaginable. From precious metals like gold, platinum, and silver to regular ferrous materials of short steel or cast iron you can find a market for your scrap metal. Car manufacturers have remelted steel to use in their factories for years now and have helped a great deal in out recycling efforts. Pawn shops will buy your old or broken gold and silver jewelry for remelting. Actually the recycling of scrap metals has become a huge world wide and profitable business.

There is more to recycling than just metals. Other categories include paper, plastic, glass, oil and even hazardous waste. As an individual we can do our part to recycle in several ways. Some people save their aluminum cans and sell them for extra cash. While saving your newspapers and magazines may not be very profitable you can still conserve our wood supply by recycling your paper products. If you are outside the city limits, the local landfill will normally deduct from the fee to dump your trash if you have a stack of newspapers. Even recycling the motor oil from our vehicles has become an important issue. Most dealerships and garages will save all their old motor oil to be recycled and even your local parts store urges the do-it-your-self people to bring in their used oil if they do their own oil change.

Everybody’s contribution to recycling is important and I think that it is essential that big businesses are aware of their responsibility to the community to do their part. Large business produce waste in such quantities that it only makes sense to have some kind of recycling plan in place and most all businesses now do have such a plan and even save money by implementing it.

Depending upon what kind of business it is can change the area of recycling needed to target although we can see a couple of waste recycling plans cover a broad arena of businesses. For instance almost all big businesses will have a large amount of cardboard and will use a compactor to press the scrap cardboard into bales for recycling. Most businesses will also have a scrap metal bin placed on their lot for their scrap metals from manufacturing waste and machinery repair.

I have only touched on a few of the general areas of the recycling effort going on today. As more and more people become aware of the importance to conserve our resources and join in the recycling effort the closer we come to solving out issues with natural resource conservation and the dangers of waste to the earth which we depend upon. Be responsible by looking at your life and making a recycling plan according to the recyclable materials you produce.