Physics and recycling

Physics and recycling don’t appear to be connected at first glance, but after a closer look, it is easy to see that physics plays an important role in looking after our planet.

Recycling is critical to our environment.  Plastic bottles, paper and cardboard, aluminum and metal cans and glass jars take up so much land fill and can be easily recycled and re-used.  All these materials take energy to create and produce. By manufacturing these costly materials damages our planet by releasing toxic gases into our atmosphere. 

Recycling is a way that everyone can help our planet. By turning the waste into re-usable items cuts down on the amount of products that need to be produced.  Paper can be made into a pulp and recycled for newspaper or cardboard.  Plastic and glass can be made into new plastic and glass items.  Aluminum and metal can be recycled into new cans and items.  Once the recycled waste is separated into plastics, glass, metal, and paper or cardboard, then the laws of physics come into play!  We use gravity, conduction, magnetism and electromagnetic waves to recycle.

• Gravity is the force that pulls everything down towards the earth.  By creating a group of holes (large and small) and spinning discs makes it easy to sort through the recyclable items. This is physics in action!  This incline of vibrating, spinning rubber discs acts like a giant sieve and sorts items according to weight. The heavier items, such as metal and glass will fall to the bottom and the lighter items like plastic and paper will be at the top.  
• It is important to separate metals and aluminum to be melted down because steel and aluminum melt at different temperatures and have different magnetic properties.  Some metals are ferromagnetic, which allows them to be pulled out with a magnet while other metals need a machine called an “eddy current separator” so we need to induce magnetism to sort the aluminum.  Ferromagnetic items are steel and easily attracted to a magnet but drink cans are made from the metal aluminum, which is not ferromagnetic. The eddy current separator is the technology that uses a rotating drum lined with rows of magnets, creating magnetic fields which separate aluminum from other metals.
• All metals, aluminum and steel conduct electricity and their specific magnetic fields create the electricity inside the metal recyclable items.  It is because of the physics of electromagnetic waves that we can successfully separate the materials to be recycled.

Tim

How Do Other Foreign Countries Deal the Daily Waste?

It is always beneficial to know how other foreign countries deal with the daily waste of materials differently. Probably individuals can get some insights, which could help them in promoting knowledge, skills and increasing the possibilities of how to reuse wasted things and to save more energy for the future. As most people know, in the education field, educators and students need a great amount and a variety of materials to make their teaching and learning more interesting and more creative. 

Canada is a good example of providing those used materials to teachers, students, and artists by the Artsjuncktion. According to Garnet (2014), the author of the article, “Recycling Material Culture”, “The Artsjunktion is a free service located in the downtown core of Toronto that accepts, sorts, and distributes all forms of material culture, providing an environmentally friendly source for art materials” (p. 2).  Actually, by the service of the Artsjunkson, schools saved the budgets of purchasing educational supplies for the art class (2014), and students learned how to save the resource by creatively using it. However, the Artsjunkson cannot handle all waste that people produce from everyday life.  

Sweden imports waste from European-neighbors as fuel to give a rich supply to the country-wide energy needs (The Swedish Recycling Revelation, 2015). Apparently, it is both a solution of saving energy and reducing waste to pollute the environment. Therefore, understanding disposing trash from a global view, individuals could really get a wider thought toward solving current environmental problems that are challenging humans.

Naomi (XN)

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References

Garnet, D. (2014). Recycling material culture: Environmentalism, free art supplies, and  Artsjunktion. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 15(2). Retrieved from http://www.ijea.org/v15n2/.

The Swedish Recycling Revelation. (2015). Retrieved June 9, 2016, from Swedish Institute: https://sweden.se/nature/the-swedish-recycling-revolution/ 

Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle

The question that many people may find themselves asking is why bother taking the time to recycle.  In this article, we will discuss the true meaning of recycling such as the how’s, whys, where the recycling goes and lastly how does the term “recycling” correlate to physics.   Recycling is the means of gathering items that can be thrown away but used to create new goods.  It is an essential element in progressing the environment and saving natural resources.  Some of the ways to promote recycling are to recycle at schools and businesses by recycling items into a specific container, recycle empty ink cartridges and cash for cans are just a few to mention. 

Recycling would cut down on the volume of the remains that go to disposal sites and the remainder of landfills would last longer.  The question in mind here is “why bother to recycle”. For starters, glass is made from all natural resources which can be reused for new glass.  It can also replace about 95% of the raw materials that is required to create new glass.  For example, recycling just 10 glass containers can save an adequate amount of energy to have a tv run for 2 hours.  For every 165 gallons of gas and the vitality to control a typical household is comparable to a ton of recycled paper; one ton also saves about 17 trees.  Also, according to the EPA, recycling paper causes 35% less water pollution and 74% less air pollution than making paper from raw materials.  Overall everyone can make a difference, let's use the 3 R’s- Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. 

Maria