My mother majored in environmental studies in college and made sure to teach me and my brother how to recycle. When it comes to recycling as waste, I would consider that my responsibility. My responsibility to make sure that everything I am recycling is actually recyclable and making sure that I am recycling everything that I can. I also extend that responsibility to my surroundings and the people who surround me. I make it my responsibility that my friends and family also recycle properly and as much as possible. I have even extended this responsibility to my community. My high school doesn’t actually recycle. The bins are all there, they teach us how to do it properly, and that it is the right thing to do and then all the bins get dumped in the trash. For most of my childhood I wasn’t aware of this so my responsibility ended when the correct recycling went in the bin, but when I realized this it started to extend to where the bin went. I tried for years to figure out how to get my school to recycle and I was never able to. I still want to try to solve this problem but when I was in high school the problem felt bigger than me and it didn’t help that all of the adults were telling me there was nothing I could do. It feels like my responsibility is to make sure that all possible recycling gets recycled properly but the problem is just too big for one person.  

After the recycling leaves in the recycling truck it could go to a recycling plant but there aren’t many or it could get shipped over to malasia where it will simply be burned. There is really no way of knowing whether my recycling is going to actually be recycled it is a scary idea. But lets say that it does get recycled. Then the single stream recycling will be run through this super interesting machine with magnets and air jets and all kinds of cool things to separate all of it into its respective types. The small pieces will fall throught at the beginning and then the cans and other metals will be caught by magnets. Then the plastic and paper get separated by a sorting machine that sucks the plastic up. Then the paper and plastics get packaged into bales and sent on to the next stage of recycling. The paper is recycled by adding water and turning it into a pulp. Some glass is broken down into a sand to be used on beaches and during natural disasters. I assume the plastic and aluminum are melted but unfortunatly this is where my knowledge of recycling ends.