Earning Money Through Recycling

Have you ever wondered how recycling works? Many Americans participate in recycling, the process of reusing materials instead of just throwing them away to be taken to a landfill. The process of general recycling can be broken into four steps.   

1. Putting it in the Bin. After you have used a product such as paper, a glass bottle, or a plastic carton, you should put it in your personal recycle bin, box, or trashcan. This can be put into a specified bin (usually green) and collected by your city or county services. If your area has no collection services, you can drive to the nearest recycle dumpster and deposit your recyclables there. 
2. Hauling. After the recyclables dumpster is full, or after a lot of bins of recycles are collected, they are usually put into a truck and sometimes pressed together to conserve space. From there, trash hauling services will take the truckload onward to the next step of the process. 
3. Materials Facility. Recyclable materials are taken to a Materials Recycling Facility by truck. There, everything is sorted out into paper, plastic, and glass. Cardboard is included with paper. The paper is broken down and then consolidated into bales. The same is true for plastic, though the processes of breaking down plastic and paper are quite different. As for glass, it must be sent to a separate glass treatment facility where it will be washed, crushed, melted down, and molded into new material. 
4. Manufacturer Plant. The consolidated bales of paper and plastic along with the new glass products are sent away from the Materials Recycling Facility and taken to manufacturing plants. Here, they are turned into all new products. The paper bales may undergo certain treatments such as bleaching and be made into sheets of paper. The plastic and glass will be used for bottles, cartons, jars, and more. 

The above process only includes recycling paper, plastic, and glass. So what about waste such as rotten fruit, coffee grounds, cat litter, dust and dirt from cleaning, and inedible food parts such as egg shells? These are examples of organic waste. If you simply throw them in the trashcan, they will probably end up in a landfill. An alternative is composting, the process of turning organic waste into compost, a nutrient-rich material that can enrich the soil. A compost pile is usually made with some soil, dead leaves, sticks, and/or wood chips. Then you add the organic waste. The micro-organisms in the waste and soil will break everything down into compost over time.