Now, it must be remembered that the space available on earth is very limited, and it is obviously up to us to use it judiciously.

Helps in creating new job opportunities

We’ve been careless up to this point with the way we’ve treated the Earth, and it’s time to change, not just the way we do things but the way we think.

Recycling begins at home. If you are not throwing away any of your old products and instead utilizing it for something new, then you are actually recycling.

Stronger plastic recycling practices should be put in place, while other materials like metals and glass become easier to recycle

There is currently no federal law that enforces recycling in the United States. The US government allows local governments to handle their own recycling legislature.

0.3% decrease because of COVID-19.

This is remarkable considering just 15 or so years ago, Slovenian waste went straight to the landfill. After a total 360, the government set a goal to achieve a 75% recycling rate by 2025 – and they are on track to achieve that goal, making them the example to emulate.

While landfills are receiving less waste, it’s also true that they are overburdened. Many materials take hundreds of years to decompose – so space is incredibly limited. The demand for closed loop recycling systems is greater than ever.

the amount of waste ending up in landfills is the lowest it’s been since 1960

Some 3000 pounds of food per second goes to waste, which means that half of all food is thrown away in North America

When at home, Americans recycle paper and plastic bottles more than any other material.

conclusions

Resistance of populations to good waste management practices

Uncontrolled landfilling

The environmental quality of a beach is often a major concern for tourists

For example, the ingestion of nano- and microplastics by planktonic organisms affects a wide range of functions such as reproduction, growth or feeding behaviour

Humans generally avoid objects that they believe to be contaminated by potential parasites, and tend to eliminate waste that can harbour or feed parasitic organisms

Thus, as the use of plastic materials has increased, the quantities of waste generated have also increased: of the 8300 million tonnes of plastic produced worldwide between 1950 and 2015, 4900 million tonnes were discarded (Geyer et al., 2017). Despite the potential for recovery, about 50% of the plastics produced are of too little value for their recovery to be economically viable. Finally, <2% of the plastic waste produced since the 1950s has been recycled, <6% incinerated and the vast majority (about 92%) has been landfilled or disposed of in the natural environment (Fig. 2) (Geyer et al., 2017). However, plastic waste is not limited to continents since approximately 4.8 to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic ends up in the oceans each year

tonnes

Approximately 50% of plastic objects made are intended for single use and only 20% to 25% for long-term use

Thus, the transition from ‘object’ to ‘waste’ is poorly understood, despite the fact that it is one of the fundamental sources of plastic pollution.

Their physico-chemical properties made it possible, among other things, to replace glass bottles, paper bags and cardboard. In the end, food packaging will extensively be made of plastic materials.

Thus, from the 1950s onwards, food packaging and containers, which had previously been made with traditional materials, were increasingly made from plastic materials, thus allowing better preservation of foodstuffs

that enable it to be applied to a wide range of applications at a cost that is often lower than traditional alternatives

This research has aimed to address two objectives of the PV modules recycling: economic and environmental benefits

As previously mentioned, the major part of the CO2 emission of the panel production comes from raw materials. Hence, if these metals are regained and reused for panel productions or other applications, from the recycled 540 MW PV modules, 43 millions of tonnes of CO2 will be saved.

On the other side of the economic perspective, renewable energy resources are demanded to replace the fossil-based energy production owing to their lower carbon emissions. However, the production of the content of these renewable energy resources consumes a huge amount of energy and emits carbon and GHGs, which have been underestimated while selecting and using (Krueger, 2010). In order to reduce environmental effects of production processes, raw material saving and waste minimisation are important factors (De Wild-Scholten, 2013; Luo et al., 2018).

The environmental and economic impacts of the recycled materials are inevitably important for every product type, especially glass and metal, including wastes such as PV modules.

As regarded in Table 1, the amount of silver, copper and aluminium are quite low and thought to be insignificant. However, in the large panel applications they create an economic impact on recycling and waste management.

Crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar panels that include single-crystalline silicon solar cells and polycrystalline silicon solar cells, and thin film photovoltaic solar panels (TFSC)

However, the solar energy applications, which transforms sun radiation to electric power, took the major interest by academics and industry, owing to solving the energy demand problem both in renewable and sustainable ways thanks to its lower GHG release

That is why, in this study it is aimed to present environmental benefits and economic recoveries of recycling photovoltaic module in Turkey.

Not only the economic value, but also the environmental impacts of the mining effluents to excavate these metals are causing emission problems.

“You need to be patient.”

One is the Recycling Resiliency Fund, meant to help communities where recycling services are in danger of shutting down due to budget shortfalls or other factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the beginning of the pandemic, many of the Latino business owners she worked with were more concerned about keeping their businesses open than modernizing their buildings with sustainable improvements. The Latino Chamber helped businesses apply for federal loans and invited them to a free COVID-19 vaccine clinic. Through that process, they were able to build trust and entice people to adopt new recycling and waste diversion strategies, she said. One of those businesses, Taco Star, was later recognized with an award from the U.S. EPA for its sustainability efforts.

While it’s important to include diverse communities in any sustainability initiative, building community trust takes time. That might mean participating in events or working on projects that at first glance don’t seem to be related to recycling or waste management, Garcia-Tellez said. 

When building new sustainability programs, consider changing your program requirements or being flexible based on people’s backgrounds, said Berenice Garcia-Tellez, equity administrator for the City and County of Denver and chair of the Latino Chamber of Commerce of Boulder County. For example, some immigrants don’t have W2 tax forms to prove employment or income, she said, which is a common document needed for some types of programs. 

“We don’t want to make assumptions about why people may not be participating” in recycling or other programs, she said. “We want to decide based around research.”

Wherever possible, collect data and make informed decisions based on community feedback instead of implementing pre-built programs, said Keysha Burton

During a panel discussion, the speakers discussed strategies for connecting with communities where English is not the primary language, where recycling services are inconvenient or nonexistent, or where the community faces other systemic barriers.