Recycling has become very important in today’s world and society to help meet the goals of cost reduction, efficient management of limited resources and reduced landfill utilization. We are accustomed to reducing, reusing, and recycling paper and plastic but unfortunately most people don’t know that you can recycle metal as well.
5 benefits of recycling metal:
1. Preserving Resources
Scrap metal recycling facilities are like mines above ground, rich with resources that can be re-used to preserve the environment, at a fraction of the cost to mine and refine metals from virgin ores. Scrap metal is not waste. Scrap metal is actually a continuous resource which can be continuously re-used, it is a resource that will never be depleted.
2. Reducing Emissions
The scrap metal recycling industry consumes a lot less energy as well as being more efficient than actually extracting and refining raw materials through traditional mining processes. Mining has a number of environmental processes such as environmental hazards, poisonous runoffs, groundwater pollution or create physical scars on the environment that can take hundreds of years for the environment to heal, causing groundwater pollution, habitat destruction and unstable geological conditions.
Recycling scrap metal requires fossil fuel inputs as well and is regarded as less energy-intensive than mining. This does not cause groundwater pollution or create physical scars on the environment which can take hundreds of years to recover. Recycling plants don’t need massive open-pit mines to function.
The mining and processing of new metal releases a much larger amount of greenhouse gas emissions as compared to recycling metals. These emissions tend to influence climate change in a negative way as well as causing harmful air pollution in the cities, which can lead to respiratory health problems for you and other city dwellers.
3. Managing Energy Consumption and Energy Conservation
When you recycle more metal, you tend to lessen the demand for natural resources. It also requires a lot less energy to process recycled metal than it does to mine virgin ore, purify and give it shape.
Energy Conservation
The amount of energy that is saved using recycled metals compared to raw metals is:
- 92% for aluminum
- 90% for copper
- 56% for steel
Recycling a single aluminum beverage, will help you save enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for more than 4 hours.
4. Economic Development
Recycling will allow you as well as the government to save money in all the right places which will allow it to better spend the taxpayer’s money.
Tangible Economic Benefits
The recycling industry is pretty labor intensive and contributes tens of billions of dollars to the country’s gross domestic product. A study by the Scrap Metal Recycling Institute found that nearly half a million jobs had been created by the scrap metal recycling industry alone.
It is important that you understand that recycling jobs require a high level of skill and training. Wages within the recycling industry vary from employer to location. High wage states tend to pay more.
5. Price Adjustments
One of the main reasons why you should recycle metal is because you will be able to save more money on it. If the majority of people can be convinced to recycle their metal rather than throw it away, this will result in a lower cost to produce metal items. This in turn will cost you less to purchase metal goods e.g. canned food
Recycling of metal is contributing to the world and the environment in a positive way as it allows productivity as well as environmental sustainability as well.
Author Bio
Erich Lawson is passionate about saving environment by effective recycling. He has written a wide array of articles on how modern recycling equipments can be used by industries to reduce monthly garbage bills and increase recycling revenue. You can learn more about environment savings techniques by visiting Northern California Compactors, Inc blog
