Environment
The world's natural resources are finite -- doing your part to conserve and reuse existing resources is more than just good corporate citizenship, it's the right thing to do.
By transforming waste materials into useable resources, recycling provides a way to manage solid waste while reducing pollution, conserving energy, creating jobs and building more competitive manufacturing industries. Like burying trash in landfills or burning it in incinerators, recycling also costs money. Assessing society's interest in recycling requires a full appraisal of the environmental and economic benefits and costs of recycling, in comparison with the one-way consumption of resources and disposal of used products and packaging in landfills and incinerators. When all of these factors are taken into account, the overwhelming advantages of recycling are apparent:
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Recycling cuts pollution and conserves natural resources. The greatest environmental benefits of recycling are related not to landfills, but to the conservation of energy and natural resources and the prevention of pollution in manufacturing that result from the use of recycled rather than virgin raw materials. Recovered materials have already been refined and processed once, so manufacturing the second time around is usually much cleaner and less energy-intensive than the first. Detailed analysis shows that these environmental benefits of recycling far outweigh any additional environmental burdens resulting from the collection, processing and transport of recyclable materials in curbside recycling programs.
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Recycling conserves energy. Much less energy is needed to make recycled materials into new products compared to beginning the process again with new, "virgin" raw materials. By recycling a ton of materials in a typical curbside recycling program, at least $187 worth of electricity, petroleum, natural gas and coal are conserved, even after accounting for the energy used to collect and transport the materials.
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Recycling avoids the costs of disposing of waste in landfills or solid waste incinerators. The costs of recycling are partially offset by avoided disposal fees and by revenues earned through the sales of materials. Disposal fees vary greatly between different regions, and markets for recyclable materials are now booming.
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Recycling programs that are sensibly designed and fully implemented can be cost-competitive with solid waste landfilling and incineration. Numerous techniques are now available to make curbside recycling more efficient, and are now being tested and implemented in communities across the country.
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Recycling creates jobs and makes manufacturing industries more competitive. Recycling provides manufacturing industries with less expensive sources of raw materials, a long-term economic advantage that translates into value for consumers who spend less on products and packaging. The industrial development effects of recycling are significant.
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