My Recycling !

Recycling is a huge part for our community, state, country, and world! In these part couple years I have really learned the importance of recycling and really how it can help not just at a local level, but truly global level as well. For this lab I had to do some research about how I personally recycled.

1. Describe your system for recycling.

Living here in Ocala our townhome community has a recycling time pick up time every Thursday. We have a large brown colored bin designed specifically for our plastics, cans, paper, cardboard, and more. When we didn’t live here in this community and in a privately owned neighborhood, it was much more difficult to recycle.

2. Estimate the daily and weekly volumes of materials. (You can record the data as numbers individual items or weights)

The bin we have here at home has the capacity of 224lbs or 64 gallons. Here at home we try to always be very conscious about recycling since all we have to do is walk to the garage and open a bin. We try to remind each other when we see other family members forgetting that there is the bin outside. Some weeks are tending to see more and others it’s much less, really depending on the amount of food we bought for the week.

3. Estimate your annual volume if you continued to recycle and describe how the environment is better for your efforts.

We don’t use all 64 gallons of our bin, I would say half of it but even with half of it, about 32 gallons a week, times 52 weeks in a year would be about 1664 gallons of material in a year. Now if we did use all 64 gallons of our bin, times 52 weeks a year, would be 3328 gallons of material a year.  This makes a huge difference and I can only imagine how big of a different could make in the community if we all used our recycling bins properly.

4. What recyclable material do you generate in the greatest quantities?

We mostly have plastic, and this is due to the large amount of water bottles bought in our home that my younger brothers use at their athletic practice.

5. What recyclable material do you generate the least amount of?

I would say we use paper the least, it’s not very common to see a large amount of paper in our recycling bin.

6. Describe the location and place you recycled your materials.

We have a recycling truck come every Thursday morning for our bin and the matierals that are not able to be recycled straight into the bin we can easily take to our closest waste facility that is about 10 mintues away from our home.