Avoid The Landfills

Anything we do not recycle - glass, paper, metals, household waste - goes into a landfill. A landfill is a giant hole in the ground into which trash is dumped. Whether the material put into landfills is deemed biodegradable or not, it does not break down in a landfill.

Why? Landfills put in large amounts of waste and then put a small amount of earth over the waste and compact it by running large equipment over the area. Without oxygen and earth, the microorganisms that we count on to breakdown the waste do not exist. When landfills have been excavated newspapers were found that were 50 years old and they were still readable. Photodegradable products mean they must be exposed to sunlight, once put into a landfill will never breakdown because they are never exposed to sunlight.

Metals obviously are not going to be broken down in a landfill and therefore need to be recycled and can earn you money. Contact us at Carbide Recycling Co. (248-926-5570) to see how we can help you save the earth and earn a little something in return.

Benefits of Recycling Metal

There are many benefits of recycling metal.

The earth has a limited amount of ore to be mined in the creation of metal products. It is more energy intensive to extract these ores from the earth to be used in the creation of products we use. Ores mined from the earth are raw and mixed with other products that are not beneficial. The costs of removing the impurities is also costly both in time and labor as well in the expenditure of other natural resources to create a finished product.

Recycling metals that already have been refined is beneficial as it uses less of our other natural resources in production and creates less opportunities for pollution of the air through dust and gases and water usage and pollution. In addition, reusing these metals stops them from being discarded into landfills.

Recycling Steel

We all have heard about recycling. We typically divide our metal, glass and paper and take the containers to the curbside once a week. Recycling is basically making the old into new again.

Aluminum and steel are the most recycled metals in the United States. Aluminum can be reprocessed indefinitely without changing its chemical make-up. When making steel from iron ore large quantities of coal, water, energy and resulting air emissions are created. By reusing the steel you can reduce the environmentally toxic emissions and it is easier to create steel from recycled materials because the impurities are already removed.

The amount of energy saved by recycling steel is 62-84%, copper 87%, Zinc 63% and Lead 60% per the statistics from the British Metals Recycling Association. This makes recycling of these products economically feasible because is costs much less to use the recycled materials than it costs to produce the same metal of mined ores.