Do You Know What Happens To Your Recycled Waste?

Do You Know What Happens To Your Recycled Waste?

Jun 15, 2018

In Australia, we’re on-the-go consumers, quite used to disposable stuff. Our landfills contain an enormous amount of potentially useful material, but once it’s there, it’s reached the end of its cycle and these sites can be toxic.

Plastics cause the biggest environmental problems. They clog up our oceans and can take up to 500 years to start breaking down on land. Burning all this plastic may seem like a good way to get rid of it, but this produces air pollution and adds to the problem of global warming.

Recycling makes our limited resources go much further. Different kinds of plastics are recycled in different ways, which are then used to make new materials. Do you know what your waste becomes once it’s been processed?

Plastics can be turned into textile insulation for jackets or sleeping bags. Thicker, high-density plastics can be turned into durable products like plastic pipes and even wheelie bins.

Kitchen and garden waste can be turned into quality garden mulch, but leaving it to rot can take years, not to mention turn your environment into a filthy nightmare. Waste management experts can collect and sort the organic from the inorganic for you to ensure quality composting.

Paper and cardboard recycling may seem like a no-brainer, but this also has to be sorted.This is because mixing the different types of material canimpact the quality of the paper created from the recycled material. Its processing has to be done responsibly, as bleaching the inks comes with its own environmental cost, plus not all paper is the same. Eventually, you can turn paper into paper, such as newspapers, while cardboard can be recycled into boxes.

Most of the metal we throw away be get melted down and turned into new food cans or aluminium drink cans. Recycling these cans is easy, but mining it can be an environmentally harmful activity.

Waste wood can be shredded and turned into laminates for flooring or fuel for burning, if you can’t find a refurbished use for it yourself. Glass, of course, is the easiest to recycle, because it’s tossed into a furnace to make brand new glass such as bottles or it’s even used to make road surfaces.

Tipping engines oils down the drain pollutes our rivers and seas. A recycler can reprocess it into new fuels such as heating oil, while vegetable oils can be turned into bio-diesel for vehicles.

Recycling your trash before it gets to landfill is where waste management companies can help. WM Waste Management can provide skips, then sort, process and transport the material for responsible recycling, making sure it doesn’t ever reach a landfill. Contact us today!

Related Tag: Waste Management Services