It’s become clear that recycling is not going to solve our solid waste problems, and zero waste should be our goal. Still, recycling and reusing materials has a role to play in reducing carbon production, because some of the manufacturing processing has already been done.

The best return is on metals. Aluminum and steel are obvious, but there’s also brass, copper, lead, stainless steel, and more. Metal production from raw materials is very carbon intensive. Digging out, crushing, and transporting the heavy ore, then smelting (melting and purifying) it at temperatures from 1200 to 2200 degrees Fahrenheit, all take a huge amount of energy. The iron smelters of Pittsburgh were fueled by Pennsylvania coal, and hydropower from major dams on the Columbia River feeds Washington state’s aluminum industry. Recycled metals still need to be transported, melted down, and re-cast into something useful, but the heavy lifting has already been done.

Where can you recycle metals? Every major population center has a scrap yard. For Humboldt Bay, it’s Arcata Salvage at 192 South G Street, Arcata. You can drop it off in the bins in front. Arcata Salvage is also a fun place to browse: there’s a collection of parts-donor bicycles, old tools, used wire fencing, and you never know what else.

Glass also recycles very well. But it’s made from very common earth materials, and it isn’t particularly valuable, so hauling it long distances doesn’t pencil out, sadly. Our local recycled glass has been crushed and mixed into asphalt rather than hauled hundreds of miles to a processor.

Some materials degrade with each use. Paper is a good example. Newsprint can be produced from recycled material, but the best paper is made from virgin pulp. A lot of paper is a mix of both new and recycled fiber. You may have noticed the difference between American-made cardboard (brown and strong), and Chinese cardboard (grayish and weak). Lacking extensive forests, the Chinese rely on reused wood fiber. One use for the lowest quality paper and cardboard is light-duty single use applications such as packing forms, egg cartons, or pulp trays for meat. The fiber in these items has degraded to the point where they are not recyclable, but reuse can be an option; your neighborhood home egg business would love to have those cartons, for example.

Plastic also loses quality with each re-processing. Mixing with virgin material is one workaround, but most plastic waste doesn’t get recycled back into the same use; it gets “down cycled” into fleece fabric, outdoor furniture, etc. There are thousands of types of plastic. Some types are more recyclable than others. The plastics industry has grouped them into seven categories, labeled by numbers in the familiar “chasing arrows” symbol. This mark implies that an item is recyclable, but that isn’t necessarily true. Styrofoam (#6), for example, is not.

PET (#1) recycles the best, but even so, most of it is “down cycled” into other products. This does give it a second use; however, those products don’t generally get recycled when their lifespan is up. So plastic is less recyclable than metals or glass, which can be used over and over.

Hardcore recyclers may enjoy taking apart an old washing machine, for example, sorting into plastic and rubber (trash) and recyclable wiring and metal parts. So, recycling is a mixed bag, as you might expect from the great variety of things we need to dispose of. Some recycle very well, like metals. Others have issues, like paper and plastic. And some, even when they seem to be labeled as recyclable, are really just landfill. As a rule of thumb, material that has already been refined and processed has a smaller carbon footprint than material sourced from nature, but this is complicated by long transport to centralized processing plants. Local initiatives like J&T’s Molded Plastic Enterprises in Redway, maker of garden pots and other products, and the now-defunct Fire and Light glassworks, show that close-to-the-source options are possible.

The mission of the Northcoast Environmental Center is to promote understanding of the relations between people and the biosphere and to conserve, protect, and celebrate terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems of northern California and southern Oregon.