2015年11月10日
2015-11-10 02:47阅读：
英美刊物题源文章阅读（二）
Americans generate about 254 million tons of trash and
recycle and compost about 87 million tons of this material, which
adds up to a 34.3 percent national recycling rate. Recycling and
composting prevented the release of approximately 186 million
metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2013, according to the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, comparable to taking over 39
million cars off the road for a year.
Aluminum cans are currently recycled more than any other
beverage container in the U.S, which is good for business and the
environment, says the Aluminum Association, because making a can
from recycled aluminum saves not only aluminum but 92 percent of
the energy required to make a new can. A 2015 analysis by the
Aluminum Association and the Can Manufactur
ers Institute determined that if all of the aluminum cans in the
U.S. were recycled, we could power four million homes and save $800
million per year. Aluminum cans are also the most valuable to
recycling companies, with a value of $1,491 per ton compared to
$385 per ton for PET plastic. “Cans are recycled at the highest
rates, and drive recycling programs across the country because of
the high value of aluminum compared to other packaging materials,”
said Heidi Brock, President and CEO of the Aluminum
Association.
In recent years, however, recycling companies are struggling
with higher processing costs, due in part to newer, larger
recycling bins that don’t require user sorting and thus become
increasingly contaminated with garbage. When the District of
Columbia replaced residents’ 32-gallon bins with ones that were 50
percent larger last year, the extensive amount of non-recyclable
material put into the bins drove up the city’s processing cost for
recyclables and cut profits from selling recyclables by more than
50 percent.
“Our biggest concern and our biggest challenge today is
municipal solid waste and contamination in our inbound stream,”
James Delvin, CEO of ReCommunity Recycling, which operates 31
facilities in 14 states, told Green is Good Radio. “It’s an
economic issue if you think about we go through all this effort to
process this material, and roughly 15 to 20 percent of what we
process ends up going back to the landfill. It’s incredibly
inefficient to do that.” In a 2014 survey by the National Waste and
Recycling Association, nearly one in 10 Americans admitted to
throwing their waste in recycling bins when trash cans were full;
one in five said they will place an item in a recycling container
even if they are not completely sure it is recyclable.
“People refer to this as ‘wishful recycling,’ that’s just
when in doubt, put this in the bin because there’s an outside
chance they might be able to recycle it,” Delvin notes. “So you see
Styrofoam. You see PVC. You see batteries and those types of
things….” This mixing of waste with recyclables, he says, makes it
very difficult to extract the true recyclable commodities that are
there that have value.
Improved education regarding the proper materials to recycle
is needed to allow recycling plants to remain economically
feasible. The pros and cons of recycling are heavily debated, but
there’s never an argument over the environmental benefits of
limiting disposable packaging and utilizing more durable reusable
goods, like shopping bags, coffee thermoses and water bottles, to
name a few, in daily life.
[字数：554；选材：科学美国人]
