What does recycling have to do with climate change?

Question

What does recycling have to do with climate change?

Answer 1

Not enough, unless you remember in some of the recycling campaigns there are 3 "R's"

Reduce

Reuse

Recycle

If we embrace that mantra, we'll be good to go by purchasing wisely, and, perhaps, less often since we often buy alot we don't need.

There are a lot of items you can find a 2nd use for, or give them to someone who can find another use.

Recycling often uses less energy and resources to manufacture.  But until people change the mindset that business feeds on: like buying water in single-use bottles and then recycling them or throwing them away instead of using refillable water bottles  -- we're going to be doing more business as usual instead of achieving true progress.  To combat global climate change, we need to work in tandem.

Answer 2

Nothing...

Recycling does not help anything, but to separate the bottles from the diapers in our landfills

Help Woodsy spread the word, climate change due to human activity does not exist.

Answer 3

nothing!!!!!!!!

Answer 4

Nothing at all, because human activity has no effect on climate.

Answer 5

helps from polluting everything

Answer 6

Most of the energy used is made by burning fossil fuels.  60% from coal in the USA.  Even nuclear requires a lot of fossil fuel to mine, refine, transport, and to manufacture the components of a plant.

Energy is used in manufacturing most goods.  Reusing an item once cuts the energy cost in half.  More than once, obviously more than half.  Some things, like metals, take less energy (and $$$) to recycle, compared to mining, refining, and smelting more raw ore.

Answer 7

A big reason is that materials are not transported as far, thus reducing the burning of fossil fuels.  Oil for plastic frequently comes from the middle east; bauxite ore for aluminum frequently comes from as far away as Russia, Scandinavia, or Australia.

For recycled materials, however, the old cans and bottles are frequently distributed to materials manufacturers within, at most, a few hundred miles.  This being the case, the aluminum can you use today is often returned to the shelf within about 60 days, on average.

This, and the resources come from local sources and go back to local distributors, so it is good for the local economy.

Answer 8

Mining and transporting raw materiels takes energy.  Manufacturing them into product san trensporting those takes energy.

The majority of our energy comes from coal-fired power plants and the majority of our transportation requires burning oil both of which increase climate change.

Recycling is more energy efficient than trying to replace that material from scratch.

Answer 9

We should reuse, and recycle.  But none of that will cause, help, or do anything for climate change.  

Keeping the Earth clean is just a good thing to do.  But recycling a lot of materials actually uses more energy than tossing it.  

Climate change caused by man is false, the Earth does what it wants.

Answer 10

Recycling and Reuse of waste materials like metals and plastics helps to reduce the cost of these materials which are originally obtained from ores that have to be mined and from petroleum gases and liquids that have to be turned into the petrochemicals required to make plastics. The energy required to transport the ores and petroleum to the foundries and refineries that change them into useful metals and petrochemicals comes from burning large amounts of hydrocarbon fuels which generates large amounts of CO2 and H2O. When you recycle metals and plastics the energy requirement is less and the amounts of CO2 generated is lessened. Since alot of CO2, a heat -trapping gas formed in excess of what photosythetic plants in nature can handle, comes from the combustion of fossil & biomass fuels, the concentration of CO2 is increasing resulting in more heat being trapped by the atmosphere and this in turn is one of the major causes of the increase of avg temperatures of the Atmosphere. We refer to that increase as "Global Warming."

With that background information, it is easy to understand that the energy you do not use to make metals and plastics from scratch is a savings. The more we recycle and reuse materials that would otherwise end up as waste the more we save and the less CO2 we produce. Bec the energy requirement for recycling vs starting from scratch is less,the amount of man-made CO2 we add to the atmosphere is less. If the amount of CO2 generated is less, so is the amount of heat trapped and the less change there is in temperatures which drives the weather and the climates we are used to. That, in a nutshell, is my explanation of the connection between recycling and reuse and climate changes that are partly caused by Global Warming(aka The Greenhouse Effect) associated with CO2 generated by the expanding economic activities of 6.7 Billion humans.

see-->http://www6.homedepot.com/ideasathome/fe...

Answer 11

If we dont recycle then plastic is put into landfills and takes 1,000 years to biodegrade