HOW DO YOU RECYCLE ???????Plastic and paper?
It depends where you live. Hopefully your city has a recycling program. If you go to your city hall, you can ask about it. If they have a program, you can find out more information about it and they will tell you how to recycle. If they do not, see if you have a recycling centre near your house and you can bring plastic, paper, and other recyclables there.
If you have a recycling bin at your house-- wait, what am I thinking? If you had a recycling bin, you wouldn't be asking this! Well, if your city has a recycling program, you can get a free recycling bin. I'm not exactly sure how, maybe check your city website?
If you want to recycle plastic and paper, and you don't have recycling bins for you home, you can find a local recycling center and drop them off there.
According to a recent article in Discover Magazine, some studies show more environmental harm is done by plastic recycling than good. Reasons for this are complex. Recycling is generally a very weak method for reducing our environmental impact. There's a slogan that says Reduce, reuse, recycle. They're in that order because that's the way to be most effective: First, try not to use plastic and paper, second, reuse as much as you can for other purposes, third, recycle if it's worth it for you to recycle. If you have to drive very far to deliver your materials to a recycling center then your driving will cause much more environmental harm than the good you think you're achieving by recycling. Many environmentalists hate hearing these basic facts because recycling makes people feel better about themselves. But the truth is that most environmental damage is done by how we consume things, not how we dispose of them after use. If we didn't buy so many electronic gadgets, for example, then there wouldn't be such a huge problem of how to dispose of the toxic materials from which they're made. Not to mention the environmental damage caused by the manufacture of computers, cell phones, etc. So, don't sweat too much about recycling. Do your best to stop using. Bring your own containers to the store, shop at coops or other environmentally friendly places, buy bulk items in your own containers, etc.
When you take paper, plastics, metals, glass, and other recyclables, you place them into recycle bins. These bins are then emptied into collection bins, like those that you or your building places into a street or alley. A recycling truck, almost identical to a garbage truck will collect these recyclables and ship them to a recycling facility. There, depending on how your area recycles, the recyclables are dumped out and sorted, sometimes by hand, usually by machine. A huge magnet picks up any metals, where they are sorted again. They are melted and remolded to make new cans, or other metal products. Paper is sifted out after going through a wall of many vertical 'discs', and is blended into pulp, and remolded once again into paper or cardboard. Newspaper, cardboard, and plastics are also recycled the same. Glass bottles are smashed and ground into sand, and reheated and remolded again into new bottles. Depending on the facility near you, the recycling plant may do this here, or in a foreign nation like China. The recycled materials, may be sold to a company, like Coca-Cola.
