Dear Skeptic:

This is the most persistent myth the recycling industry has to debunk. The materials you take the trouble to drop in your recycling bin are resources - they are not trash! There's still plenty of useful energy embodied in the paper and cardboard items and the plastic, glass and metal containers collected in household recycling programs.

After they're picked up from your home, school or business, these materials are sorted, baled, brokered and shipped to manufacturers that make new products with post-consumer recycled content.

You can make paper from paper 4-5 times, so high-grade copier and printer paper may become an ingredient in newsprint, along with old magazines and junk mail. Lower grade fibers, that have been used in recycled-content products a couple of times, are the ideal makings for recycled-content toilet tissue because janitorial paper goods are designed to make the last possible use of fibers before they disintegrate in sewage treatment processes. Other recycled paper products, like shredded cellulose insulation, can keep the energy of trees in use for decades, blown into building walls.

Steel and aluminum cans and bottles can be melted and reprocessed into new containers - over and over again! The soda can you recycle can be back on a store shelf, filled with a fresh beverage, in just six weeks. All new steel products include a percentage of recycled steel, and they can all be recycled again at the end of their useful lives. Your empty soup can could become part of a guard rail, which may one day be recycled into an appliance.

For almost as long as people have been making glass, this material has been melted down and repurposed as individual items outlive their usefulness. Your empty glass jar could be transformed into dinnerware, a glass doorknob, fiberglass insulation or paving material.

Plastics are more complex, because each type of plastic resin (identified by the number 1 through 7 in the three-chasing-arrows recycling symbol) melts and flows a little differently in the remanufacturing process, like different oils and fats you use in cooking. Plastics #1 and 2 are used the most to made new products, from clothing to carpet to car parts. Plastic #6, polystyrene, is the hardest to market and least in demand at this time, so it's often excluded from recycling collection.

Recyclers: Think resource, not trash! You are keeping valuable materials in circulation and in use, saving Earth's limited virgin materials from being cut down, drilled up or mined. You're promoting eco-logical economics too, because manufacturing with recycled materials uses less energy and water, prevents air and water pollution and generates less solid waste. Recycling collectors aren't going to pay to landfill materials that are in demand.

The only myth in this equation? That stuff just winds up in landfills anyway.

Green Jean