Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at
2:52 pm
By Mark Thomas Walters
Every year thousands upon thousands of tons of trash is poured into landfills. Though we are in no danger of running short on landfill space, this is expensive in terms of space, time, and energy invested, along with the sheer waste of materials that will not ever be used again. With that in mind, consider the reasons below for keeping your steel and aluminum cans out of landfill sites by recycling them instead.
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Friday, December 18th, 2009 at
3:48 pm
Of all the materials recycled in America, steel tops the list. Steel recycling is also one of the older processes because of the ease of doing so and the high cost in actually making steel from scratch.
All new steel in the U.S. contains at least 28% recycled content, with some varieties containing 90%.
Tin cans are actually steel. Cars, even lightweight ones, are built on steel. Appliances are made from steel. Steel girders hold up commercial buildings and form the backbone of bridges. And in 2008 in North America 83% of the steel in these products was recycled instead of discarded.
This data was just released by the Steel Recycling Institute which also maintains a website on the different aspects of Sustainable Steel.
Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at
3:38 pm
Sometimes participating in recycling is as simple as making choices about where your raw materials come from, as David Virtue has done in handcrafting wedding rings. It adds a bit of uniqueness to his product but wouldn’t be as valuable if the rings themselves were simple and not ornate works of art.
This is what’s happening if you send in your old gold jewelry or coins to those ads that have been popping up everywhere. The company collecting them is reselling them to a refinery to be recyled.
The scrap is sent to a gold or precious metals refinery where it is melted down and filtered chemically to remove the pure gold from the other elements that made it hard enough to wear as jewelry or use in coinage. Then it is condensed down into bullion to be stored as an investment or reprocessed into new gold objects.
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