
The recycling It is part of the process of the life cycle of the products, in when the waste returns to become raw material to manufacture new products. Thus, over and over again, allowing you to make the most of natural resources. However, there comes a time when it is no longer possible to recycle. How many times can you actually recycle paper, glass, plastic, or metals?
Recycling
The same paper could not be recycled over and over again indefinitely. It has a very logical explanation, to transform this used material into a new one, it must be subjected to a pulping process, then carry out different washing operations and pass it through a series of filters. All this causes the cellulose fiber of which it is made to fray and shorten, reducing its consistency and length. Finally, the fiber will be so deteriorated by successive recycling that it will remain in the filters of the processing plant. treatment. The circle is broken, it can no longer be recycled. However, to avoid this, it is essential to add virgin fiber extracted from trees to the process to renew the raw material.
On the other hand, a glass bottle can be recycled indefinitely to produce other bottles. It is a material that can be 100% recycled and does not lose any of its qualities. However, there is the limitation of the color of the material itself. If we assume the bottle is green, it will not be used to make another transparent one.
The recycling of plastics has certain limitations. So that a plastic (polyethylene terephthalate (PET), low or high density polyethylene, polystyrene) that is thrown into the yellow container becomes useful again, first you have to crush it, wash it and melt it into small plastic grains. This is a thermal process that degrades the material. Therefore, it can only be recycled a maximum of about five times, even less.
Conclusions.
In the case of bottles made of PET, they can be made into a fleece or carpet. You will have been given a new life to the plastic, but it will be only your last stage to the landfill, as there will be no way to return it again to the beginning of the cycle.
Finally, we have metals, which like glass can be recycled over and over again without end. This is what happens with lead in car batteries, which Spanish manufacturers can reuse indefinitely to produce new batteries without having to resort to farms mining. The fate of some of the recycled metals will depend on their quality, or what is the same, their purity. The problem is that consumers mix them all and it costs more to separate them. In any case, its high demand, especially for metals such as aluminum or copper, means that there is a lot of interest in recycled material.
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