Image © Karen Struthers/AGE

Recycling is a pretty simple concept: take something that isn't useful anymore and make it into something new instead of just throwing it away. On a small scale, it's great. Like when your artist neighbor uses pieces of old farm and landscaping equipment to make lawn furniture. He's keeping that stuff out of a landfill and making it useful again – just in a different way.

Recycling becomes even more important on larger scales. At this level, used consumer goods are collected, converted back into raw materials and remade into new consumer products. Aluminum cans, office paper, steel from old buildings and plastic containers are all examples of materials commonly recycled in large quantities, often through municipal programs encouraging bulk household collections.

It's rare for a recycled product to be exactly the same as the original material from which it was recycled. Recycled paper, for example, contains ink residue and has shorter fibers than virgin paper (paper made from wood pulp). Because of this, it may be less desirable for some purposes, such as paper used in a copy machine. When a recycled good is cheaper or weaker than the original product, it's known as down-cycling (or downstream recycling). Eventually, goods move so far down the recycling stream it isn't feasible to recycle them any further. After being recycled a few times, paper is no longer usable. In some cases, goods can be up-cycled -- made into something more valuable than the original product.

Why Recycle?
There are many reasons to recycle. Probably the most obvious is that there's just too much garbage and not enough places to put it. One of the main reasons for recycling is to reduce the amount of garbage sent to landfills. In the 1980s, Americans sent almost 150 million tons of garbage to landfills each year. Today, we still dump a lot of trash into landfills, but our recycling efforts are paying off. We manage to divert 32 percent of waste away from landfills. That prevents more than 60 million tons of garbage from ending up in landfills every year.

In addition to taking up lots of space, landfills cause another problem. The assortment of chemicals thrown into landfills, plus the chemicals that result when garbage breaks down and blends into a toxic soup known as leachate, creates huge amounts of pollution. Leachate can drain out of the landfill and contaminate groundwater supplies. Today, impermeable clay caps and plastic sheeting prevent much of this run off, making the landfills much safer than they were just a few decades ago. Still, any leachate is too much if it's draining into your neighborhood.

If space and pollution in your neighborhood aren't enough to make you want to recycle, consider the global environment. Making a brand-new product without any recycled material causes natural resources to deplete in the manufacturing process. Paper uses wood pulp from trees, while the manufacture of plastics requires the use of fossil fuels like oil and natural gas. Making something from recycled materials means using fewer natural resources. And, sometimes, recycling also means using less energy.

There's room for debate on this aspect of recycling in regard to some materials, but there are recycling processes that require less energy than it would take to make the same item brand-new.