Recyclable materials

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Aluminum gum wrappers were stripped for airplane fuselages. Cash crop, aluminum cans are about 20 percent cheaper to recycle than to make and require 5 percent of the energy. Car parts and home siding are other candidates for recycling.

Steel. Nothing stands in the way of recovering steel, which is 100 percent recyclable and can be reprocessed almost indefinitely. Like aluminum (above left), steel is sturdy and has a long shelf life, making it ideal for food containers. Steel cans that might be refashioned into bicycles or nails. Environmentalists say solid-waste woes would disappear if other materials were as easy to reuse as aluminum and steel.

Paper — 37 percent of American nation’s waste — is one of the easiest materials to recycle. Of some 70 million tons made in 1990, more than 20 million tons were recycled in the U. S. or exported for recycling.

Why cut down a tree to make a newspaper with a lifetime use of just over 20 minutes, then bury it if you can use it six times over, then burn what’s left to create energy.

Paper is usually made from chipped wood, softened into a wet mush and formed into a thin sheet. Recycling repeats the process with the paper itself, removing the ink, glue, and coating. But that process breaks down some of the fibers, requiring the addition of new pulp to maintain paper strength. Recycling paper will never completely eliminate cutting down trees said but it could mean cutting fewer trees.

Giant success, environmentally sound bathroom tissue rolls off the line at the Fort Howard Corporation. Made of 100 percent recycled paper, this spool will be cut into 80,000 rolls like the one held by CEO Don De Meuse. Each year the company recycles enough paper to cover a hundred-acre landfill 18 feet deep.

Plastics account for 8 percent of American trash, third behind paper and yard clippings. Made from a wide range of natural gas and petroleum recipes, they do not mix easily for remaking into new products. And, as with the paper market, the plastics industry favors making plastic out of raw materials. As a result only 2 percent of plastic is recycled.

Soft-drink bottles are the exception. Made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), they can be melted down and regenerated into a cottony fiber used in jacket insulation, pillow stuffings, and car interiors, or molded into bottles again.

A hundred-million-dollar-a-year business, Image Carpets in 1976 began making carpets out of nylon and polyester, then changed to PET because of its consistent high quality.

Second to PET in plastics recycling is high-density polyethylene (HDPE), the standard milk jug. Waste Alternatives, one of some 120 HDPE recyclers nationwide, reduces HDPE containers to tiny pellets that are bought by the makers of shampoo and detergent bottles. A rebirth into milk jugs is difficult under the safety standards set by the Food and Drug Administration, which worries that people might store gasoline or insecticide in the containers before discarding them. Waste Alternatives is experimenting with plastic lumber as another possible outlet.

Yet recycling plastic has its problems: The many varieties are difficult to sort, and chemicals stored in plastic containers can contaminate reprocessed material.

Glass. “Glasphalt” glitters on Manhattan streets paved with a mix of recycled glass bottles and asphalt. Such innovations move recycling along an upward path, as consumers exchange rampant waste for environmental awareness.

Questions:

1. Which material is 100 percent renewable?

a. steel b. plastic c. glass d. aluminum e. paper

2. How might steel cans be refashioned?

a. They might be refashioned into airplane fuselages.

b. They might be refashioned into new food containers.

c. They might be refashioned into bicycles or nails.

3. What material is the easiest to recycle?

a. steel b. plastic c. glass d. aluminum e. paper

4. How many percent of plastic is recycled?

a. Plastic is not a recyclable material.

b. Only 2 percent of plastic is recycled.

c. It is difficult to recycle plastic.

5. Why is it so important to recycle paper?

a. Paper is easy to recycle.

b. Recycling means cutting fewer trees.

c. Recycling will completely eliminate cutting down trees.

6. Why are Manhattan streets glittering?

a. The streets of Manhattan are paved with a mix of recycled glass bottles and asphalt.

b. Manhattan streets are very busy with traffic.

c. There a lot of lights along the streets of Manhattan.

Exercise 8. Read the text “New Ideas” and fill in the diagram given below: