Recycling Part 2

I have tried to reach waste management professionals for two weeks with limited success. Even industrial websites seem to hide behind a blue bin and bury their statistics within unreachable files. Unless I become a member of all the associations, it seems that I can only get teacher's resource material on recycling:

Question: "How do we recycle steel?"

Answer: "We wash it out and put it in the blue box!"

I'm sorry, but this is not going to cut it for me. People should know that steel is crushed and baled and sent to an electric arc furnace to be zapped with enough electricity to make it molten. It's then cast into ingots or extruded into shapes. And what about the trucks that drive around miles of suburban streets collecting it all? Or the fresh water that is used to clean or rinse out all the materials at the recycling depot? 

I fear that recyclers are only doing financial accounting, i.e. Recycling equals money, measured in dollars, calculated by (expenses-income) / lbs of material recycled. What needs to be done is resource accounting. What are we putting in and taking out of the planet in the greater life cycle of this recycled material? A recycler could take his electricity and water bills and the quantity of material recycled and at least know a ballpark figure of how expensive recycling is in terms of these resources. A simple calculation could be done.

But nobody seems to do anything if there isn't a financial incentive.

We, the public, should be aware of what we are doing every time we throw a tin (steel) can in our blue bins. Or Aluminum cans, cardboard boxes, glass jars, plastic bottles, or newspapers.

I'm working on pulling together the information that is publicly accessible in this regard. Wherever it is lacking (which is common), I intend to be critical and ask questions. I want to set up a way for recyclers to track resources. I want the public to be knowledgeable, knowing what recycling is going on in their neighbourhood. Ignorance is not going to improve our recycling programs; it's a matter of educated accounting.

The more you know about finances, the more money you save.

The more you know about recycling, the more resources you save.