WHAT REALLY HAPPENS WHEN YOU RECYCLE

In the past few months, the act of recycling has gradually been taking on the spotlight. Just finished a bottle of water? RECYCLE. Just finished a packet of Milo? RECYCLE. Just received a nightmarish score on your Maths test? RECYCLE (okay maybe not until after your exam). And with the introduction of a mini recycling bin in every classroom, recycling is now easier than ever in TCSH. Despite this new ease, however, many people still seem to be demonstrating a lack of understanding and an overall lack of care for recycling. Did you know that by disposing of your recyclables into the appropriate bin, you could be building roofs, providing prosthetic limbs, jackets and all while saving crazy amounts of energy?

Everybody knows that recycling is good for you. It is good for the Earth, which will be good for us so why don’t we do it? It really is not that hard to walk a few more steps and throw your plastic bottle into the recycling bin instead of the normal bin and it really is not that hard to choose the right bin. The amount of waste we produce can shock you. Collectively, Americans use approximately 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour. The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year. And these are just statistics for America, a single country. Can you imagine this for the whole world?

So what really happens to those plastic containers, aluminium cans, paper and tetrapaks you throw into the recycling bin?

Let us start with the plastics. The majority of the right plastic that gets recycled in TCSH consists of plastic bottles. The majority of the wrong plastic consists of plastic bags and plastic wrappers (yes, those Tim Tam wrappers and Mamee Monster packets are sadly not recyclable at TCSH). Also, please note that plastic lids on coffee cups are actually recyclable plastics - if you look closely at the lids, they actually have a recycling label on them.

Once delivered to the recycling centre, plastics are sorted and then crushed together to form huge cubes. At a plastic processing plant, these cubes are broken down and shredded, cleaned and distributed to manufactures. These manufactures then melt this plastic to be made into different products such as toys, stationery, t-shirts or simply different forms of plastic again and making plastic out of recycled resources uses about two-thirds less energy than making new plastic.

Next up, in the same bin as the plastics, we have the aluminium cans. The pop tabs from aluminium cans can be used to make prosthetic limbs and if you haven’t noticed, there’s a little carton thing that’s attached to a poster around TCSH for people to drop off their pop tabs to go into making prosthetic limbs. The pop tabs are combined with steel to make these limbs for the needy. Surprising as it may be, such a small effort can have a dramatic effect on such a huge industry. Using recycled pop tabs helps reduce the cost of producing prosthetic limbs by as much as 90%.

Aluminium cans are 100% recyclable and are often transformed back into new cans. Making new cans takes 95% less energy to produce than if one were to make a whole new can from scratch. What happens to the aluminium cans exactly after being collected from the recycling bin is similar to plastics – they are formed into cubes, shredded, cleaned, and rolled into thin sheets to be sold to manufacturing companies to be made into cans again.

Onto the next bin, we have paper! Once again, just like plastics, the paper is sorted at the recycling plant. Then, water is added to the paper to create a pulp which is screened to remove glue, staples and such. Like aluminium, paper is often transformed into a similar version of itself again. It takes only a week to recycle newspaper and magazines into fresh newsprint to be printed on again. Cardboard is recycled into other cardboard-packaging products.

Moving on, we have what might be the easiest recyclable item ever - tetrapaks. There is so little room to go wrong with tetrapaks. All recyclable tetrapaks have a label on them and all you have to do is remove the straw from your carton once you’re done and ready to recycle it. (Flattening is also appreciated so they take up less room.) Tetrapaks, like aluminium cans are 100% recyclable - 75% paper fibre and 25% plastic or aluminium. So after being collected by the recycling center, the tetrapaks will be mixed with water in a gigantic blender, kind of like the pulping process with paper. Here, we will obtain a separated mixture - one with paper fibre and one with a polymer-aluminium mix. The paper fibre can be made into tissue, office paper and egg cartons while the poly-al mix can be made into roofing tiles. All these products are made with drying and heating processes.

Side note! You should really try your best to clean all your items before disposing of it in the recycling bin. Grease and food stains on plastics and papers can contaminate the recycling process and cause it to be un-recyclable in the end.

And of course, all these recyclable items can even be used in DIY projects to make all sorts of quirky items from plant pots to decorative household objects to dresses to furniture. Some whole houses are even made from these recyclable items.

Some people may feel that they do not play an important role in the recycling process, that there is simply too much waste (or rather too many ignorant people) such that no amount of recycling on their part could ever really make a difference, and the end of the world is imminent and inevitable and therefore pointless to fight. However, I believe that every single one of us should take on responsibility as a fellow resident of the Earth and make it our job to do our part in making earth a little more comfortable to live in and a little less closer to destruction. The power of one small person, one small act of recycling can cause a huge difference to a huge earth.

Written by Chin Wye Mun