When recycling people talk about the three r’s, reduce, reuse and recycle. The first two are very simple, let’s start with reduce: with which you reduce the amount of waste you make with alternatives, for example, you could instead of buying packs of plastic water bottles buy one reusable water bottle. The second “R”, reuse, states that anything can have a second use, whether it was made with that intention or you have to change some aspects of it, and example of it would be the reusable water bottle in the first example. The third “R”, recycle, is a bit more complicated to integrate into our daily lives, it is to put different materials through a process that will make it so that you can create completely different things.
Recycling is usually done by official institutes or private facilities, some of these have special cans that resemble trash cans but are colored different that you can put outside your home and these will be taken the same way trash is. These usually say that everything that has a recycling symbol can be recycled and sometimes mention a general aspect of what can be recycled such as plastic, glass, cardboard. After that all responsibility is out of your hands, but what if half of the things you throw in a recycling bin are going to a dumpster instead of being processed.
In the image below you can see a recycling symbol. It is the one used to promote recycling and what its used to identify everything that can be recycled.
What we are often not told by the facilities that do the recycling process is that there are 7 types of plastics and you can find them identified in the middle of the symbol.
These numbers are quite important when recycling because these are used to identify the different types of plastics, for example, plastics 1 would be Polyethylene Terephthalate which mainly consists of water bottles and beer bottles, while plastics 4 are Low Density Polyethylene which are mostly used to make shopping bags and food wraps. In the facilities, these are important because each type of material is divided by so but these numbers are important to us because depending on the facility there is a possibility everything you are throwing in the recycling bin is not actually being recycled.
In some places, not all seven plastics are actually recycled but we are not being told, after the materials are divided everything that is not being recycled is taken to a dumpster, the place you were trying to avoid in the first place. For example if you live in a place where recycling is taken care off by the public services, although a lot of money could be made from recycling to get more funds for the community by selling the materials made from it to big companies, they might only be recycling 3-4 of the plastics in the list because it pleases the people but takes less effort than doing them all.
Why is it important for you to know this? Because we need to call it out, we cannot show them we are pleased with them recycling half of what we throw in the recycling bin when everything in it can be made into something else. The world is wonderful and has provided us everything we could ever need to become the best versions of ourselves, so why don’t we let it be its best version of itself?
