Monticello Live

It’s about making a difference. Recycling is a concern across our nation, and it’s no different here in Monticello.

Some interesting facts about recycling:

• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough electricity to run a TV for 3 hours
• Aluminum cans thrown away by Americans in one month would reach the moon if stacked end to end.
• Throwing out one aluminum can wastes enough energy to equal half of the can filled with gasoline. Americans toss 35 billion cans each year.
• It takes an aluminum can 200 years to decompose.
• The average household generates 38 pounds of PET plastic bottles (examples are soda and juice containers) each year.
• If you drink one 20 oz. soda each day, you generate 23 pounds of PET plastic in a year. Two weeks worth, 14 bottles, will yield enough fiber for an XL T-shirt or one square foot of carpeting.
• Recycling one glass bottle saves enough energy to light a 110-watt bulb for 4 hours.

Monticello’s recycling center currently services only between 300-400 homes, but even that makes a difference. The recyclables from Monticello are compacted into large bundles using the machine pictured here and then sold to ORE-Recovered Material of Clinton, Arkansas. Last year, ORE reported concerning just the paper from Monticello that was recycled. 209.54 tons of paper was recycled from Monticello between the months of January and June, six months. Most of the shredded paper is from UAM but not all of it.

Because of the efforts of Cathy Davis and others at the Monticello Recycling Center and the university’s committment to recycling we saved in just six months:

• 3,562 trees
• 859,114 KWH of energy
• 1,466,780 gallons of water
• 691 cubic yards of landfill
• 12,572 pounds of air pollution

Although Cathy is doing a great job at recycling there are some steps to be taken to make this program even more effective. Recycle products are picked up each Wednesday morning within city limits. To be added to the route and begin recycling, please call Cathy Davis at 367-4407. She is more than willing to answer questions in order to help more and more people get involved.

Once a household is added to the program items for recycling should be grouped into the following categories:

-cardboard (if large quantity of boxes, please flatten)
-newspaper
-shredded office paper (paper that is NOT shredded is NOT accepted at this time)
-aluminum cans (no food cans, no aluminum foil)
-plastic milk jugs, soda bottles, water bottles, etc. (no wide mouth plastics such as peanut butter jars)

At this time, glass is not accepted along with paper plates or stryofoam containers.

To find out more about recycling search the web and the sites are endless. One such site is Recycle City, a great place for people any age, but especially younger students, to learn more about recycling.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 6:38 am and is filed under Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.