The risks of climate change have been growing recently, making people and governments, organizations around the world searching for opportunities to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and to attain the ‘zero carbon’ objectives. Another factor that cannot be dismissed but largely ignored is recycling services and management of waste or garbage.
When we discard things into a landfill, the paper, food waste, yard waste, and many other products undergo biodegradation, and in the process emit a toxic and effective greenhouse gas, methane, 25 times as effective as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. In fact, landfills are the third biggest source of methane emissions in the US after dairies and other livestock operations. However, when we recycle these materials instead, not only do we avoid those emissions but we also avoid the demand on virgin materials for extraction as well as processing. This alone is a major conservation of energy and greatly reduces the need for more carbon dioxide and other pollutions.
The EPA reports that globally, recycling saves about 2. 4 billion metric tons of carbon annually and in the United States alone, it reduces 185 million metric tons annually, the equivalent of over 39 million passenger vehicles. When scaled up to the international level, the effect of cutting carbon dioxide emissions is ten or even hundreds of times more significant. Recycling is one of the ways which humanity can adopt in order to address the issue of climate change.
How Recycling Reduces Emissions
There are several ways in which recycling leads to lower greenhouse gas emissions:There are several ways in which recycling leads to lower greenhouse gas emissions:
- Avoids Landfill Methane: Moreover, taking organic waste products like paper, cardboard, food waste, and yard wastes to landfill leads to anaerobic digestion and release of methane. Recycling is the process of forwarding such items to disposal centers that are equipped to manage them.
- Reduces Virgin Material Extraction: The recycling of materials for production help in minimizing the use of virgin resources in the market and help in minimizing the use of virgin resources. For instance, manufacturing aluminium can from recycled aluminium saves about 95% energy in comparison to manufacturing from bauxite ore While recycling paper, carbon emission is 35% lower than using virgin pulp.
- Saves Manufacturing Energy: Besides, recycling takes out a smaller amount of virgin resources and consumes less energy during the manufacturing of products. Recycling of plastics and converting them to bottles or fibers is 75% cheaper than when the items are produced from crude oil. Recycled glass is melted at a lower temperature in this case it will use less energy also.
Prevents Incineration Pollution: If waste is directly utilized in combustion without utilizing energy, then many toxic pollutants come out like dioxins, sulfur dioxide, lead, mercury, furans, and particulates. Recycling assists in reducing the disposal of many materials through burning.
The Recycling Process
In order for recycling to achieve maximum carbon reduction benefits, proper processes need to be followed across the whole recycling chain:In order for recycling to achieve maximum carbon reduction benefits, proper processes need to be followed across the whole recycling chain:
- Collection and Sorting: It is therefore important that households and businesses require easy access to recycling pickup and other related services that deal with the collection of recyclable material such as paper, plastics, glass, and metals. Materials collected from the premises should be transported to centres that deal in sorting materials of high quality with the use of equipments such as magnets, optical scanners, hand sort, and density separators.
- Processing: After the materials have been separated based on their type, and the recycling goes through a paper mill, a plastic reclaimer, glass beneficiary or metal smelter. This is where post-consumer materials are size reduced, cleaned, processed through a melting process, separated, and transformed into recycled products.
- Manufacturing: These recycled materials can now replace virgin inputs in a manufacturing supply chain across such industries – turned into new paper, cardboard, plastic products, cloth fiber, metal components, construction materials, and glassware.
- Purchase of Recycled Goods: It is essential for consumers to go out and take their money, and buy products that are made from recycled materials in all industries. This economic pull provides revenue for the fundamenatal sustenance of the recycling systems and also a way of funding its expansion.
There are various policy tools that can be employed to encourage recycling.
There are several policy tools commonly implemented by governments to promote recycling and maximize participation:There are several policy tools commonly implemented by governments to promote recycling and maximize participation:
• Prescriptions for curbside recycling and landfill prohibitions on recyclable materials to encourage landfill reduction
• A pay as you throw system where people are charged according to the volumes they generate for disposal directing recyclables to other purposes
• Beverage container deposit laws where producers put in place deposit charges to ensure compliance with high recovery rates
• Legal compliance of recycled material regulations that lay down obligatory recycled content standards such as the percentage recyclability of packaging products that include bottles, cans, cartons, and papers.
• That means grant for the recycling center and tax incentives for covering expenses related to the usage of recycled materials.
• Renewable Portfolio Standards which mandate utilities to buy credits from renewable resources such as diverted biomass waste
The Way Forward
Sustainability management and converting towards 100% recyclability of products and/or the maximum recycling rates internationally must become central to meeting carbon reduction targets set under the Paris Agreements. Diverting organic wastes and recycling rate will go a long way to reducing the emission of green house gases as achievable by these communities. The potential for such climate benefits is to be effectively captured through multi-stakeholder cooperation involving the municipalities, regional councils, product producing companies, waste management companies, recycling processors and consumers. However, the environmental and the economic need for the development of strong comprehensive zero waste and recycling system is apparent. The need for a better approach to address the climate crisis cannot be overemphasized and the practice of recycling wasted materials better than littering the environment is one of the ways to achieve this.
