What Happens When we Recycle

Newspapers and 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, which is later remade into newsprint.

Recycled newspaper is reprocessed into newsprint and wrapping paper, manufactured into molded packaging, shredded, and fireproofing added for blown-in cellulose insulation, or manufactured into sheetrock surfacing.

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: medium (the ribbed inner layer) and liner board (the smooth outer layer). Both are sold to a boxboard plant to be formed into new corrugated cardboard.

Recycled cardboard is manufactured into medium, linerboard, and paper for brown paper bags.

Aluminum
Aluminum scrap is ground or shredded into small chips before being melted and cast into molds. The molds are sent to manufacturing plants, and are molded or rolled into sheets that can be shaped into various products. Rolled sheets of recycled aluminum can be formed into many products, such as car bodies or soda cans.

Tin cans
"Tin" cans are really tin-coated steel cans. The tin coating on steel cans is removed with a caustic de-tinning solution and then extracted from the solution by electrolysis. The remaining steel is rinsed, baled, and sold to a steel mill. Tin and steel are separated. The recycled tin is used by the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and the steel is re-manufactured into cars, cans, and structures. Most steel products contain some recycled steel.

Glass
Recycled glass is re-manufactured into glass containers and fiberglass insulation, and construction uses glass, such as utility trench backfill, road base material, and 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.