Energy And Recycling

We already know recycling helps to keep tons of waste out of landfills, but did you know that recycling helps to save energy too? Industries that produce new products from recycled materials use less energy since they dont have to process raw materials from the scratch. The goods we use and the materials that are made require energy to produce and they make an impact on the environment when they are disposed. Recycling of the disposal solves both the problems.


Energy conservation is the main benefit of recycling. The usage of recycled products rather than producing a new one eliminates the energy consumption in transporting the raw materials to the manufacturing unit. Secondly only less energy is required to manufacture a new product through recycling, than producing it from the raw materials. The recycling of aluminium cans is an excellent example. This reduction in cost of raw materials and the savings in energy input costs reduces overall price of the product and increases the competitiveness of the industry.

So we can see that recycling is closely tied to energy conservation. Recycling saves energy by reducing the following parameters:

- Delivered electricity.
- Process heat.
- Transport
- Miscellaneous energy inputs.

Shown below are some facts about energy conservation through recycling:

- Recycling aluminium saves 95 % energy used to manufacture virgin aluminium.
- Recycling 1 tonne newspaper saves enough energy to heat a home for 6 days.
- A recycling 1 tonne plastic saves the equivalent energy of 3.85 barrels of oil.
- Recycling one glass bottle can save enough energy to light a 100 watt bulb for four hours.
- In total, the recycling of 953,900 tons of paper, glass, plastic, and other materials in a year saves enough energy to power 124,000 homes for the same one year.

Think of the worthless garbage turning into worthy energy! Sounds great isnt it? So from the examples shown above its clear that recycling is the very important way of saving energy. So lets encourage recycling and help in producing clean energy from dirty scrap.

Source: Energy And Recycling