How does recycling help consereve fossil fuels?

Question

How does recycling help consereve fossil fuels?

Answer 1

Every consumable item had to be created. Most things are created in factories that burna dn emit fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas, or crude oil. All items come from raw material, which is found in nature- usually as a fosil fuel or a tree or a mineral (rock or stone).

If you recycle, that item will go into making something else and it will therefore also be using less raw material and less energy to reproduce that item from its' raw state becasue it will already be in its material form. An example is a plastic bottle being recycled is already plastic; so it won't have to undergo a process that will make it into something else- it is already plastic so it can be used to make other palstic items.

Answer 2

Plastic is made from oil, and oil is a fossil fuel. Therefore, the more plastic we recycle, the less has to be created each year, saving millions of barrels of oil each year.

As for paper and other recyclables, you would mainly be saving the fossil fuels that woudl normally be consumed to create new products.

Answer 3

There are several ways.  First of all, plastic, vinyl, and other similar materials are all petroleum-based.  An enormous amount of the things that are used everyday were originally made from oil.  Recycling plastic products (especially bottles and other food containers) reduces the amount of oil used for this purpose.

Aluminum is another big fossil fuel burner because of transport and processing.  Aluminum is derived from an ore called bauxite, which largely comes from Australia, Guinea, Surinam, and Jamaica.  Bauxite ore is exported overseas to the U.S. and other aluminum-consuming countries to be refined.  

The refining process also uses fossil fuels, and the yield of pure aluminum that would be used in a soda can is only about a quarter of the amount of bauxite that goes into it.  For example, if you take 1000 kilograms of bauxite, you will be able to extract about 500kg of aluminum oxide(alumina).  From this mass of aluminum oxide, only about 250kg of pure aluminum will come out of it.

When aluminum is recycled, however, you start with the pure product and end with the pure product, and usually the recycling plants are within the same region, shortening the refining process significantly and saving thousands of gallons of fossil fuels in transport.

In fact, recycling aluminum is so efficient that the president of the recycling company in my region stated that it is their number one source of profit.  We don't have to import from other countries to get our aluminum; we can use resources collected on native soil!