America Recycles Day is Nov. 15. Let’s celebrate it by reassessing our work and home recycling habits.
Visit www.nrc-recycle.org/americarecycles.aspx for a fun and interesting tour about recycling in the United States. In addition to reading up on some great recycling facts and maybe taking the Recycling Pledge for your home state, click on the “Conversionator” tool at the bottom of the page and see what happens to some of your recyclable waste items.
Here’s a little more background about recycling in Germany:
It’s required by law. Germany doesn’t have the luxury of wide open spaces like we have in many areas of the United States. Therefore, long before we were running out of sites for new landfills in many U.S. communities, German
communities had already surpassed that point.
The German government had to take dramatic action several years ago to reduce the volume of municipal solid waste being generated and deposited in landfills. They enacted several mandatory steps that tax and regulate
commercial packaging; forced recycling of many waste materials; began incinerating nearly all of this waste; and distributed the costs of all these programs across the board to business and industry as well as the citizens and German government.
Now that mandatory recycling has been in place for a number of years, their statistics demonstrate how much better we could be doing in the United States. We’ve set goals for reaching 35 percent diversion of our waste to recycling by 2010. Germans already recycle more than 70 percent of their waste. However, this is very costly and many of the materials they collect exceed their capacity for reuse within Germany.
For instance, many of their plastics are shipped to Asian countries for use in clothing and shoe manufacturing. Also, many scrap metals and wood products are utilized by neighboring countries around Europe. However, there is a continuous effort in research and development of new technologies to utilize recycled materials.
In Germany, many items previously made exclusively of wood, concrete or steel may now be constructed of recycled plastics. Some examples include autobahn sound barrier walls, park benches and picnic tables, large decorative planters and an ever-growing assortment of construction materials, furniture and other products.
We may not be living in the United States to celebrate America Recycles Day with our fellow Americans, but we can help our German friends conserve resources and protect the environment by recycling every day.
(Don Doran is the environmental protection specialist with the U.S. Army Garrison Kaiserslautern’s Directorate of Public Works.)
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America Recycles Day is Nov. 15. Let’s celebrate it by reassessing our work and home recycling habits.
Visit www.nrc-recycle.org/americarecycles.aspx for a fun and interesting tour about recycling in the United States. In addition to reading up on some great recycling facts and maybe taking the Recycling Pledge for your home state, click on the “Conversionator” tool at the bottom of the page and see what happens to some of your recyclable waste items.
Here’s a little more background about recycling in Germany:
It’s required by law. Germany doesn’t have the luxury of wide open spaces like we have in many areas of the United States. Therefore, long before we were running out of sites for new landfills in many U.S. communities, German
communities had already surpassed that point.
The German government had to take dramatic action several years ago to reduce the volume of municipal solid waste being generated and deposited in landfills. They enacted several mandatory steps that tax and regulate
commercial packaging; forced recycling of many waste materials; began incinerating nearly all of this waste; and distributed the costs of all these programs across the board to business and industry as well as the citizens and German government.
Now that mandatory recycling has been in place for a number of years, their statistics demonstrate how much better we could be doing in the United States. We’ve set goals for reaching 35 percent diversion of our waste to recycling by 2010. Germans already recycle more than 70 percent of their waste. However, this is very costly and many of the materials they collect exceed their capacity for reuse within Germany.
For instance, many of their plastics are shipped to Asian countries for use in clothing and shoe manufacturing. Also, many scrap metals and wood products are utilized by neighboring countries around Europe. However, there is a continuous effort in research and development of new technologies to utilize recycled materials.
In Germany, many items previously made exclusively of wood, concrete or steel may now be constructed of recycled plastics. Some examples include autobahn sound barrier walls, park benches and picnic tables, large decorative planters and an ever-growing assortment of construction materials, furniture and other products.
We may not be living in the United States to celebrate America Recycles Day with our fellow Americans, but we can help our German friends conserve resources and protect the environment by recycling every day.
(Don Doran is the environmental protection specialist with the U.S. Army Garrison Kaiserslautern’s Directorate of Public Works.)