For a Safer Earth: Buy Recycled Products
One of the worst ways to dispose of waste is to put it in a landfill. Garbage dumps can be a physical and chemical hazard, contaminating groundwater or releasing toxic gases that create breathing difficulties for all living beings.
Thankfully, over the last 25 years, landfills have been made safer, and more people have embraced recycling.
However, simply separating out recyclables in your trash is not enough. The crucial element toward making a recycling program most effective and our environment more clean and safe is for consumers to purchase more products made of recycled products.
Closing the Loop
The familiar recycling symbol of three arrows represents the three stages of recycling:
- Collection of recyclable materials in a curbside bin or at a dropoff site
- Manufacturing or reprocessing recyclable material into new products
- Buying products manufactured with recycled materials
The third stage is important because buying recycled products "closes the loop" of recycling programs by helping establish demand and maintaining markets for these items. As demand increases, more markets for the materials will develop; in turn, recycled product collection programs will increase in popularity, which means fewer dangerous products will end up in landfills where they can damage our environment and our health.
Look for the symbol
It's not always easy to identify a recycled product. An empty recycling triangle may only be a reminder to recycle, not an indication that the product is made from recycled products.
Look for the recycling symbol inside a circle. That is the sign that a product contains some recycled material. (Some products, such as those of steel, aluminum and glass, will not have the symbol.)
The second element to look for is the amount of recycled content in a product. There are two kinds:
- Post-consumer material is something that someone has used and recycled, such as newspaper or plastic milk jugs
- Pre-consumer material is something that has never been used by anyone, such as scraps from a factory
Pre-consumer recycling is good, but it doesn't help maintain consumer recycling programs or lessen the amount of potentially dangerous discarded waste to be managed. Look for and purchase products with labels that say they contain post-consumer materials.
This is getting easier, as products with recycled content are more and more commonly available. Among the most popular are:
- Paper towels, toilet paper and facial tissue
- Writing paper, envelopes, greeting cards
- Anti-freeze and re-refined motor oil
- Bulletin boards, carpet, floor tiles
- Cardboard and boxes
- Construction products such as drywall, paving, beams, insulation and ceiling tiles
- Truck bed mats and retread tires
-- Kenneth Krause
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