What happens when you recycle?

Newspapers & Magazines

• Shredded newspapers are put into a hydra-pulper and converted to a paste. Shredded magazines are added because the clay in the magazines helps to remove the ink. Screens are used to remove contaminants. The pulp is bleached and mixed with pulp from wood chips that have been added to strengthen it. The water is drained off. The pulp is flattened out and dried by steam-heated rollers. It is then trimmed and rolled up as white blank newsprint stock later to be remade into newsprint.

Cardboard

• Corrugated cardboard is pulped and blended with new pulp from wood chips. The pulp is screened, rolled, and dried into two types of cardboard called medium (the ribbed inner layer) and linerboard (the smooth outer layer). Both are sold to a boxboard plant to be formed into new corrugated cardboard.

Aluminum

• Aluminum scrap is ground or shredded into small chips before being melted and cast into molds. The molds are sent to manufacturing plants where they are molded or rolled into sheets that can be shaped into various products.

Tin Cans

• "Tin" cans are really tin-coated steel cans. The tin coating on steel cans is removed with a caustic de-tinning solution then extracted from the solution by electrolysis. The remaining steel is rinsed, baled, and sold to a steel mill

Glass

• Recycled glass is remanufactured into glass containers and fiberglass insulation, and construction uses glass such as utility trench backfill and road base material, glassphalt paving.

Motor Oil

• Recycled motor oil is used to lighten bunker fuel, the heavy residue left from virgin oil refining, for use in ships; boilers, burned in asphalt plants and cement and lime kilns for processing heat and re-refining into motor oil.