Student Printz: Going Green: Recycling can be incorporated into daily life
Filed under: Earth 911 - August 28, 2007
By: Brandon Drescher and Jodie Jawor, Ph.D
Posted: 8/28/07
We’ve all heard about the concerns of global warming and the decline in overall environmental quality overall, and many people wonder what they can do to be more environmentally friendly.
One of the most important and influential things you can do to help the environment is to recycle. We have all seen advertisements telling us how good recycling can be. It is not hard and isn’t time consuming at all. It is very easy to incorporate recycling into your daily life.
The aluminum can is the most valuable material to recycle. Over 50 percent of aluminum cans are recycled, but that can always go up. It takes 95 percent less energy to make a new can from a used can. The amount of energy needed to produce one can from virgin aluminum ore can make 20 recycled cans. Recycling one aluminum can also produce 95 percent less air pollution and 97 percent less water pollution than making a can from new ore, and it can be back on the shelves within 90 days.
By recycling a singe can, you can save enough energy to run your television for three hours. For those who worry about soaring gas prices take this into account, throwing away one aluminum can wastes as much energy as throwing out half of that can’s volume of gasoline.
The tab of our soda can holds the purest aluminum available, and the Ronald McDonald’s House for Kids Foundation collects them. So even if you do not recycle the can itself, save the pop tab for another good cause.
Or, you could take your recycled aluminum cans to your nearest recycling center and earn some money. About 40 pounds of aluminum cans is worth roughly $20.
Paper is another material that is easily recyclable. Everyone uses a large amount of paper during the school year, but instead of throwing it away why not put it in a recycling bin? The production of a ton of paper requires 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water and more energy per ton than the production of glass or steel.
More than 40 percent of garbage being dumped each year is paper. More than 67 million tons of paper are used annually, which is about 580 pounds per person. In 1997 13,600 tons of paper were recycled, saving 231,300 trees and 95,200,000 million gallons of water. One tree can filter up to 60 pounds of pollutants from the air each year, so imagine how much pollution could be filtered from the air with that many trees being saved.
The Student Printz is the main newspaper read on campus. If you’d care to save a 40-foot fir tree, all you need to do is recycle a four-foot stack of the Printz. For every ton of newspaper recycled, enough energy is saved to power a TV for 31 hours.
It’s a new school year, time to establish new habits and interests and it’s time to take the facts concerning the health of our environment to heart. One way of helping is by making recycling a priority in each of our lives in order to better our environment and ourselves.
For more information on recycling, see the Web sites buyrecyled.com, oroloma.org or earth911.org, or go to a Sierra Club meeting on Tuesday nights at 5 p.m. in room 229 of the Thad Cochran Center.