Buying bedding in bulk often comes with a large price tag and an even bigger bag of plastic wrapped around it. Personally, I don’t buy bedding pellets as they’re typically a bit too rough for rats and I don’t trust my ferrets to not knock all of it out instead of letting them cause chaos however they like. Instead, I buy soft bedding, usually the Kaytee brand for my rats as it expands and is much better than wood shavings. I know very little of what actually happens to the bags once I’m done using them and place them in the recycling, but I can’t help but feel like I’m recycling something that isn’t meant to be recycled. The bedding itself on the back of the packaging claims “Clean & Cozy (TM) bedding is made from ingredients that don’t contain harmful chemicals or by-products. Instead, the bedding is a super-soft, colorfast bedding that is safe for your pets and won’t stain their cage. These products reduce the amount of waste material that ends up in the landfill. How do they do it? We get more out of our resources by using discarded remnants and trimmings from other hygienic products which may otherwise end up in landfills.” These packages are very condensed, unfortunately the plastic is sturdy, but not sturdy enough to resist the animals that bite and rip at the plastic (ferrets). Now, I looked all over my package without trying to spill any of it and didn’t see a recycle sign. I’m hoping I haven’t been recycling something that is garbage. Their website also doesn’t say which is very frustrating, so I suppose all I can do is hope that I’ve been disposing of the empty plastic bag correctly.

Cardboard, when not made of recycled materials, is typically made of Kraft paper, which is the same brown paper that many paper bags are made of. Kraft paper is made of wood that has been pulped. It is pulped mechanically (ground and crushed), then chemically using sulfates or sulfites. 

Once the cardboard has been put in the recycling, brought to a sorting facility, and baled, it goes to a processing plant. At those plants, the cardboard is soaked to break it down, mixed with new wood fibers to strengthen it, and made into more cardboard. Cardboard can go through this process 5-7 times before it is no longer able to be recycled because the fibers it is made of break down enough that they cannot be remade into cardboard or other things. In 2018, about 96.5 percent of corrugated cardboard in the US was recycled. It is unclear whether this means 96.5 percent of cardboard made its way to recycling facilities or if it was remade into other things. Either way, that’s really impressive.

https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/how-a-cardboard-box-is-made/

https://recyclenation.com/2021/05/a-step-by-step-guide-to-what-happens-to-the-cardboard-and-paper-you-recycle/

https://stlcityrecycles.com/how-many-times-can-this-be-recycled/

https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/paper-and-paperboard-material-specific-data

Glass kombucha bottles are an item that I often find myself throwing into the recycling bin. For the purpose of this assignment I’ll be talking about glass in general. Glass is surprisingly easy material to produce. There are several different materials used to make it, but it is mostly made from glass sand, calcium carbonate, and sodium carbonate. Once the materials are mixed together they are heated at 3,090 degrees after it is molten glass. Then the glass is molded into its desired shape. The process is obviously more complicated than that, but it does follow mixing, melting, and molding. Glass has been around for thousands of years and is a very environmentally friendly material. It doesn’t release any toxic chemicals over time like plastic. Once it is recycled the process is actually quite similar to producing it, it is just melted and mixed in with other glass to make more products. In fact about ⅓ of all glass products are made from glass that has already been recycled. The downsides are that a glass furnace can not be turned off over its 15 – 18 year lifespan of use and does produce some amount of carbon dioxide. That is the negative environmental impact of glass. From what I can tell I think we should have nearly enough glass already made so that we don’t have to keep making more of it. If every single glass item was sent back to places that could remold it the usage would/is indefinite never really an expiration date. Glass by nature is not and can not be a single use item, which I believe is a reason for it being so sustainable. Even if glass is colored it is still 100% recyclable. On average around 13 million jars made of glass are recycled and 30 days for a glass to go from recycling bin to shelved product. 

 

• Sources

https://www.aaa-glass.com/how-to-make-glass/

https://www.agc-glass.eu/en/sustainability/environmental-achievements/environmental-impact#:~:text=The%20major%20environmental%20impact%20of,atmospheric%20emissions%20from%20melting%20activities&text=The%20combustion%20of%20natural%20gas,during%20the%20production%20of%20glass.

https://www.eastlongmeadowma.gov/778/What-happens-to#:~:text=Glass%20bottles%20and%20jars%20are,repeatedly%20without%20losing%20their%20quality.

 

Choose a type of object that you often put in the recycling bin. Try to search on the internet what factors go into its production, and what happens to it after going through the recycling infrastructures. (Do no more than 30 minutes of searching and reading, unless you want to.) Is it typically made back into a similar product, or does it become something else? Include links to your sources.

Readings from this week:

Reno, Joshua, and Catherine Alexander. “Introduction.” In Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation of Materials, Values, and Social Relations. New York: Zed Books, 2012, 1-32.

Katz, Cheryl. “Piling Up: How China’s Ban on Importing Waste Has Stalled Global Recycling.” Yale Environment 360.  December 30, 2019. (Original link: https://e360.yale.edu/features/piling-up-how-chinas-ban-on-importing-waste-has-stalled-global-recycling).

MacBride, Samantha. “Does Recycling Actually Conserve or Preserve Things?” Discard Studies (blog), February 11, 2019. (Original link: https://discardstudies.com/2019/02/11/12755/)

Schlossberg, Tala, and Nayeema Raza. “Opinion | The Great Recycling Con.” The New York Times , December 9, 2019, sec. Opinion. https://nyti.ms/3c2Eu7T (watch the 6 min video)

John Oliver on plastics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E