If you’ve ever recycled in your life, then you know it’s a way to make some cash in a pinch. Recycling not only puts a few dollars in your pocket, it also helps out our environment. Metals, plastics, and other harmful substances line our streets. Often times in big cities, we’ll see the homeless with their collection of cans, bottles, copper wiring, etc.

They’re not the only people who are doing this. Many ordinary people from average communities go to great lengths to recycle old aluminum cans and glass bottles. It may look strange to walk alongside the road picking up cans, but you’re helping the environment and earning cold hard cash.

Recycling is one of the easiest things in the world to do. There is a lot of junk to be found in any town or city you live in. By taking a simple walk around the block, you can probably spot an entire shopping cart worth of junk just lying around. Cans are always the most common lying around, but you’ll also see bits of wire, hubcaps, bottles, countless plastic items, etc. (more…)

Paper recycling is the process of recovering waste paper and then remaking it into new paper products. There are three categories of paper that can be effectively used as feed stocks for making recycled paper.

The first is mill broke, followed by pre-consumer waste, and then post-consumer waste. Mill broke is paper trimmings and other paper scrap leftover from the manufacturing of paper, and is recycled internally in a paper mill.

Pre-consumer waste is material that was discarded prior to consumer use. And post-consumer waste is material discarded after consumer use, such as OM (old magazines), OTD (old telephone directories), and RMP (residential mixed paper). Any paper that is suitable for recycling is referred to as scrap paper.

Over 90% of paper pulp is made from wood, holding paper production accountable for around 35% of felled trees. Recycling of newsprint saves around 1 ton of wood while recycling 1 ton of printing paper saves a little more than 2 tons of wood.

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Electricity has always been with us. It was here before humans, and will continue to be here long after we’re gone. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and can be our best friend or a dreadful enemy. The idea of using electricity has been around for over 2,000 years. In 600 B.C., Thales of Miletus wrote about pieces of amber becoming charged if they were rubbed against something.What we now know to be simply static electricity was something of a marvel at the time. From that time, we’ve grown leaps and bounds, and now have the knowledge to use electricity to our best advantage, as we see with automobiles. But it didn’t happen overnight. The path to the future is paved with great milestones.

Until 1600, no one had a word for what Thales had discovered. Then, an English scientist named William Gilbert finally coined the term “electricity” after the Greek word for amber. He wrote about the electrical properties of many substances in his De Magnete, Magneticisique Corporibus. (more…)