What It's All About
Recycling means giving materials a second life. It is the final effort after reuse to keep something out of a landfill. Unlike reuse, which tries to keep the material in use with only small changes, recycling transforms the material into a new product. Recycling requires more resources than reusing.
Rudimentary Recycling
People have found ways to recycle many different materials, including aluminum, paper, glass, and some plastics. Paper and cardboard are chopped up, deinked, and processed into new pieces of paper and cardboard. Aluminum is melted down and then reformed into new aluminum products. Glass is washed, broken up into small pieces, melted, and molded into new glass products. Some plastics are washed, chopped up, melted, and made into new plastic products. Recycling, while not as efficient as reusing, still saves resources and conserves energy when compared to making products out of virgin resources. For example, it takes 95 percent less energy to make recycled aluminum cans, 60 percent less energy to make recycled paper, and 30 percent less energy to make recycled glass than it would using new resources.
Check out www.kidsrecyclingzone.com for an online learning adventure for your students. With games, fun facts, magic tricks, and even training to be a recycling superhero, your kids will have a blast. It even has a list of additional links for more fun and learning through sites like PBS and Disney.
Downcycle Versus Upcycle
Recycling is meant to reuse resources by creating new products that are just as strong and useful as the original. Glass (which is made from sand) and metal (which is made from mineral ores) can be recycled an infinite number of times and still be just as strong as when they were first created. Paper (mostly made from trees) and plastic (mostly made from petroleum), on the other hand, become weaker and less useful when they are recycled. For example, nice white office paper cannot be recycled into nice white office paper more than a couple of times. The wood fiber just gets too weak. Instead, it gets recycled into cardboard and other paperboards, but after six or seven times of being recycled, it can hold up no longer and ends up trashed. Plastic has a similar story but a shorter lifespan. When a material cannot be recycled into an equally strong and useful product, it is called downcycling.
Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a television for three hours. In the United States, people use more than 80 trillion aluminum soda cans every year! Luckily, beverage cans are some of the most widely recycled items.
The opposite of downcycling is upcycling. Upcycling is when someone takes something headed for the trash and turns into something more useful than it was originally. It's a lot like reusing, but the main difference is that it's meant for designers to think about upcycling options at the end of a product's life instead of downcycling options. When someone invents a new package or product, they immediately think of how to design it so it can easily be upcycled when it's done being used. You can try a fun upcycling project by folding a newspaper (preferably one that used soy inks) into a pot for a seedling. You can find directions at www.geocities.com/newspaperpots. The reason it's upcycling instead of recycling is that it doesn't require any energy or resources (other than your own labor) to make it into something else. Another added bonus is that when the plant is ready to go in the ground, you can put the whole pot in because it will naturally decompose in the soil. No waste at all!
