As You Sow You Shall Mow

It is an awful lot of rubbish. According to European Union statistics, the amount of municipal waste produced in western Europe increased by 23% between 1995 and 2003, to reach 577kg per person. (So much for the plan to reduce waste per person to 300kg by 2000.) As the volume of waste has increased, so have recycling efforts. In 1980 America recycled only 9.6% of its municipal rubbish; today the rate stands at 32%. A similar trend can be seen in Europe, where some countries, such as Austria and the Netherlands, now recycle 60% or more of their municipal waste. Britain's recycling rate, at 27%, is low, but it is improving fast, having nearly doubled in the past three years.

"We are constantly being asked: Is recycling worth doing on environmentalgrounds?" says Julian Parfitt, principal analyst at Waste & Resources Action Programme (wrap), a non-profit British company that encourages recycling and develops markets for recycled materials.

Studies that look at the entire life cycle of a particular material can shed light on this question in a particular case, but WRAP decided to take a broader look. The researchers looked at more than 200 scenarios, comparing the impact of recycling with that of burying or burning particular types of waste material. They found that in 83% of all scenarios that included recycling, it was indeed better for the environment.

Based on this study, WRAP calculated that Britain's recycling efforts reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by 10m-15m tonnes per year. That is equivalent to a 10% reduction in Britain's annual carbon-dioxide emissions from transport, or roughly equivalent to taking 3.5m cars off the roads.

Recycling has many other benefits, too. It conserves natural resources. It also reduces the amount of waste that is buried or burnt, hardly ideal ways to get rid of the stuff. Landfills take up valuable space and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas; and although incineratorsare not as polluting as they once were, they still produce noxious emissions, so people dislike having them around. But perhaps the most valuable benefit of recycling is the saving in energy and the reduction in greenhouse gases and pollution that result when scrap materials are substituted for virgin feedstock.

Extracting metals from ore, in particular, is extremely energy-intensive. Recycling aluminum, for example, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass. Recycling also reduces emissions of pollutants that can cause smog, acid rain and the contamination of waterways.

The virtue of recycling has been appreciated for centuries. For thousands of years metal items have been recycled by melting and reforming them into new weapons or tools. During the industrial revolution, recyclers began to form businesses and later trade associations, dealingin the collection, trade and processing of metals and paper. In the 1930s many people survived the Great Depression by peddling scraps of metal, rags and other items. In those days reuse and recycling were often economic necessities. Recycling also played an important role during the second world war, when scrap metal was turned into weapons.

As industrial societies began to produce ever-growing quantities of garbage, recycling took on a new meaning. Rather than recycling materials for purely economic reasons, communities began to think about how to reduce the waste flow to landfills and incinerators.

By the early 1990s so many American cities had established recycling programmes that the resulting glut of materials caused the market price for curbside recyclables to fall from around $50 per ton to about $30. As with all commodities, costs for recyclables fluctuate. But the average price for curbside materials has since slowly increased to about $90 per ton.

Even so, most curbside recycling programmes are not financially self-sustaining. The cost of collecting, transporting and sorting materials generally exceeds the revenues generated by selling the recyclables, and is also greater than the disposal costs. Exceptions do exist, largely near ports in dense urban areas that charge high feesfor landfill disposal and enjoy good market conditions for the sale of recyclables.

(The Source: adapted from www.economist.com/node/9249262 )

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II. Reading	\|	D. Put these sentences in the order in which they happened, taking your information from the text “As You Sow You Shall Mow”.

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