The power of recycling

By Rep. Bob Latta

We typ­i­cally give an imme­di­ate sigh of relief when we throw out our waste. Out of sight, out of mind. How­ever, that isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the end of the story.

Every one of us gen­er­ates approx­i­mately four pounds of waste per per­son per day.

That amounts to Amer­i­cans gen­er­at­ing 243 mil­lion tons of paper, plas­tic, metal, glass and other waste annu­ally. Of that, we typ­i­cally recover and reuse 34 per­cent of what we discard.

This Novem­ber in cel­e­bra­tion of Amer­ica Recy­cles Day, we encour­age you to think twice about what’s in your waste bin. We all know that recy­cling is good for the envi­ron­ment, but did you know it could help the economy?

Increased use of recy­cled mate­ri­als improves U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ers’ energy effi­ciency, which makes them more com­pet­i­tive and helps pro­tect U.S.-based jobs.

The lat­est recy­cling eco­nomic impact study done by the Ohio Depart­ment of Nat­ural Resources reports that the Ohio recy­cling indus­try “gen­er­ates $22.5 bil­lion in direct sales, employs more than 100,000 peo­ple and accounts for $650.6 mil­lion in state tax revenues.”

Sim­ply put, when man­u­fac­tur­ers make new prod­ucts out of the mate­ri­als house­holds and busi­nesses recy­cle, they reduce their energy con­sump­tion, lower pro­duc­tion costs and decrease emissions.

Let’s use glass as an example.

It takes more energy to make a glass bot­tle from raw mate­ri­als than using recy­cled glass bot­tles as the source material.

For every 10 per­cent of recy­cled glass used in pro­duc­tion, Owens-Illinois, one of the world’s largest user of post-consumer glass, is able to use three per­cent less energy.

In prac­ti­cal terms, recy­cling one glass bot­tle saves enough energy to power a 100-watt light bulb for four hours or a com­puter for 30 min­utes, accord­ing to the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency.

But there’s more to the story. Every 10 per­cent of recy­cled glass used in pro­duc­tion also cuts car­bon emis­sions by five per­cent, and every kilo­gram of recy­cled glass that is used in man­u­fac­tur­ing replaces 1.2 kilo­grams of raw materials.

Using recy­cled post-consumer glass to make new con­tain­ers keeps these prod­ucts out of land­fills and helps keep glass man­u­fac­tur­ing costs low.

Over time that amounts to huge sav­ings and pro­tects these highly skilled man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs.

In order to reap long-term ben­e­fits from recy­cling, the rate of con­sump­tion and recy­cling needs to meet equi­lib­rium in Ohio.

Cur­rently, there is a void in that capac­ity. Nation­ally, about 25 per­cent of glass pack­ag­ing is recy­cled. In Ohio, the num­ber is much lower. Ohio house­holds and busi­nesses gen­er­ate roughly 517,000 tons of glass per year; how­ever, we only recy­cle about 11 per­cent of the total consumed.

If Amer­i­cans, and Ohioans, are able to turn around these fig­ures and recy­cle about 50 per­cent of our glass, the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency esti­mates the energy sav­ings would be enough to power 22,000 house­holds for an entire year—that’s the equiv­a­lent of pow­er­ing sev­eral town­ships in the Fifth Con­gres­sional District.

If you’d like to cel­e­brate Amer­ica Recy­cles Day, spon­sored by Keep Amer­ica Beau­ti­ful and orga­ni­za­tions across the U.S. to edu­cate and moti­vate Amer­i­cans to recy­cle, please drop off your glass bot­tles and other recy­clable items at nearby recy­cling locations.

Rep. Bob Latta serves on the House Energy and Com­merce Com­mit­tee and Miguel Esco­bar is Pres­i­dent, North Amer­ica at Owens-Illinois, one of the world’s largest user of post-consumer glass.

Posted by Guest 2 Columnist on Nov 26 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.