Dumpster Diving to Recycle has been a common practice for years
Why Recycle?
A big part of dumpster diving is using materials, eating food, and doing other things with “trash” that may have been otherwise thrown out wastefully. According to an EPA estimate in 2012, Americans create roughly 251 million tons of garbage each year. As a result of increasing wealth and populations we are not only buying more items but there are increasingly more people creating waste on the planet. Factor in changing lifestyles where more and more of us are eating fast food, which generates a large amount of non-biodegradable waste, and we start to see the importance of recycling. As a dumpster diver, you can help push the line!
How Can I Recycle?
All recycling starts with your choice to think about the impact of your decisions and how it will affect the environment. The three main ways to recycle are to reduce the amount of waste, re-use items instead of throw them away, and recycle waste items instead of just throwing them in the trash. Repurposing or reusing containers and products is a much better alternative to letting them be put to waste in a landfill. Not only will you be helping the environment but you will also save money by not making additional purchases. Always think about how you could reuse something before you throw it away – or even something that is already thrown away.
Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. It is an alternative to “conventional” waste disposal that can save material and help lower greenhouse gas emissions (compared to plastic production,[1][2] for example). Recycling can prevent the waste of potentially useful materials and reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, thereby reducing: energy usage, air pollution (from incineration), and water pollution (from landfilling).
Recycling is a key component of modern waste reduction and is the third component of the “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” waste hierarchy.[3][4]
There are some ISO standards related to recycling such as ISO 15270:2008 for plastics waste and ISO 14001:2004 for environmental management control of recycling practice.
Recyclable materials include many kinds of glass, paper, and cardboard, metal, plastic, tires, textiles, and electronics. The composting or other reuse of biodegradable waste—such as food or garden waste—is also considered recycling.[2] Materials to be recycled are either brought to a collection center or picked up from the curbside, then sorted, cleaned, and reprocessed into new materials destined for manufacturing.
In the strictest sense, recycling of a material would produce a fresh supply of the same material—for example, used office paper would be converted into new office paper or used polystyrene foam into new polystyrene. However, this is often difficult or too expensive (compared with producing the same product from raw materials or other sources), so “recycling” of many products or materials involves their reuse in producing different materials (for example, paperboard) instead. Another form of recycling is the salvage of certain materials from complex products, either due to their intrinsic value (such as lead from car batteries, or gold from circuit boards), or due to their hazardous nature (e.g., removal and reuse of mercury from thermometers and thermostats).
During periods when resources were scarce and hard to come by, archaeological studies of ancient waste dumps show less household waste (such as ash, broken tools, and pottery)—implying more waste was being recycled in the absence of new material.[5]
In pre-industrial times, there is evidence of scrap bronze and other metals being collected in Europe and melted down for perpetual reuse.[6] Paper recycling was first recorded in 1031 when Japanese shops sold repulped paper.[7][8] In Britain dust and ash from wood and coal fires was collected by “dustmen” and downcycled as a base material used in brick making. The main driver for these types of recycling was the economic advantage of obtaining recycled feedstock instead of acquiring virgin material, as well as a lack of public waste removal in ever more densely populated areas.[5] In 1813, Benjamin Law developed the process of turning rags into “shoddy” and “mungo” wool in Batley, Yorkshire. This material combined recycled fibers with virgin wool. The West Yorkshire shoddy industry in towns such as Batley and Dewsbury lasted from the early 19th century to at least 1914.
Industrialization spurred demand for affordable materials; aside from rags, ferrous scrap metals were coveted as they were cheaper to acquire than virgin ore. Railroads both purchased and sold scrap metal in the 19th century, and the growing steel and automobile industries purchased scrap in the early 20th century. Many secondary goods were collected, processed and sold by peddlers who scoured dumps and city streets for discarded machinery, pots, pans, and other sources of metal. By World War I, thousands of such peddlers roamed the streets of American cities, taking advantage of market forces to recycle post-consumer materials back into industrial production.[9]
Beverage bottles were recycled with a refundable deposit at some drink manufacturers in Great Britain and Ireland around 1800, notably Schweppes.[10] An official recycling system with refundable deposits was established in Sweden for bottles in 1884 and aluminum beverage cans in 1982; the law led to a recycling rate for beverage containers of 84–99 percent depending on type, and a glass bottle can be refilled over 20 times on average.
