How Recycling Saves Energy and Natural Resources

How Recycling Really Helps the Environment

If you watched DSTV during the 2010s, you might remember the kids’ reduce, reuse, recycle! song playing from your speakers. The three R’s have been around since the 1970s and children have been learning about them ever since. But when you leave school, the saying often fades and becomes a distant memory that doesn’t really make much difference to your daily life.

If you were to reawaken the three R’s (specifically the third one: recycle) and look at them from an adult perspective, their value becomes undeniable. Recycling is even more relevant today than it was 20 years ago and could help us solve a myriad of environmental issues.

Recycling to Meet the Demand for Raw Materials

Everything around us comes from the earth. Even the most sophisticated tech gadgets were once rough pieces of rock, for example. The current concern is that most of our natural resources are finite, so they will eventually run out. Recycling can help us maintain a steady supply by turning fully-formed products back into raw materials.

Mining

Mining is a crucial first step to making anything that contains metal, ceramics, or glass. The electrical and electronics industry also relies on mining to source minerals like lithium and cobalt, and rare earth metals like neodymium and terbium.

These elements are in high demand, and mines can’t keep up. For example, the International Energy Agency suggests that the demand for lithium will triple by 2030, and we could face shortages as early as 2025. Lithium is an essential component of rechargeable batteries. Recycling electronics allows us to recover lithium and other valuable elements from e-waste to help us meet the surging demand.

Another often overlooked sector is sand mining. According to UNEP, sand is the second-most exploited natural resource after water and the current extraction rate exceeds natural replenishment rates. Without sand, we cannot make glass or concrete and all construction would cease. Recycling glass and making construction products from recycled materials could help us avoid a crisis.

Crude Oil and Natural Gas Extraction

Nearly all plastics are made from crude oil or natural gas. These raw materials are extracted from underground, then sent to a refinery where they are separated into products like petrol, diesel, paraffin, propane, and butane. Through this process, we also obtain the building blocks of plastic – ethane and propene.

In 2016, Worldometer estimated that we have enough crude oil to support us for another 47 years and enough natural gas for 52 years (if the current demand stays the same). Should we discover new oil fields, those numbers may increase.

While this may make oil and natural gas seem relatively abundant, they are non-renewable fossil fuels and will not last forever. That is why recycling plastic is so important. Recycling means using plastic waste as an alternative source of ethane and propene so we can keep making plastic products without crude oil or natural gas.

Forestry

Forestry is about growing trees to provide raw materials. In South Africa, commercial forests provide us with timber for construction, wood for fuel and furniture, and paper and cardboard products. Forestry also provides tall oil, lignin, and cellulose, which we use to make things like adhesive, detergent, sweetener, cosmetics, clothing, and food flavourings.

Most of the wood we harvest comes from special timber plantations managed by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). These trees are considered a renewable resource. However, recycling paper and wood products is still a good idea. It helps us get the most out of every tree we plant, allowing us to reuse wood products for as long as possible.

It is estimated that one sheet of paper can be recycled up to 25 times without losing strength. After that, it can be made into lower-grade materials like egg cartons and tissue paper. This shows how recycling keeps paper and cardboard in circulation for longer and reduces the reliance on freshly harvested wood.

Recycling to Use Less Energy

Besides helping us avoid the total depletion of all natural resources, recycling can also help us save electricity. The amount of energy it takes to manufacture products from virgin materials is often exorbitant. With some materials, recycling can reduce that energy usage significantly.

Take aluminium for example. It is more energy-intensive to produce aluminium ingots than steel ingots due to aluminium’s intense smelting requirements. Refining aluminium from rock is responsible for 4% of the world’s total electricity consumption. When you melt down recycled aluminium instead, the energy usage can drop by up to 95%.

Similar is true for recycled plastics. A recent study on plastic recycling notes that reprocessing just one tonne of plastic can save up to 130 million kilojoules (over 36,000 Kw hours) of electricity. Since most electricity still comes from coal, using less power means producing less air pollution.

Become a Regular Recycler

In a world of resource shortages, recycling is king. Reprocessing used plastics, metals, paper, and glass into new products will soon become a necessity for all industrialised economies. The good news is that South Africa has already joined the party with forward-thinking EPR policies.

To find out more about recycling and EPR and how to get your business involved, please contact us.

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