Freeway - Recycling

Recycling

Herein Sweden we have a well developed recycling program. We can recycle almost everything. We leave all our sorted garbage like paper and cans at a recycling station. Some people also have a compost, where we put food leftovers. Later on it turns into soil. Our school recycles, among others, whatever they can recycle.

What do we do with everything we have sorted out?

Everything that can be burnt like domestic refuse and soft plastics are burnt and transformed into energy. Paper, glass, cans and hard plastics are recycled into new packings. Paper, for example, can be recycled 5-7 times before the fibres are worn out. Some things like refrigerators contains dangerous subjects, for example Freon. This subject is very dangerous for the environment. To be able to recycle the refrigerator we need to take the Freon and send it to destruction or terminal storage. The metal is recycled into new metal objects.
From the 1 October 1994, product responsibility started to matter. When you buy a product, some goes to recycling the packing. But it isn’t much that goes to recycling. A milk box cost 7 SEK and just 0.01 SEK goes to recycling.

Recycling stations
At the recycling station you can leave your old paper, old news paper, plastic, metal, coloured glass, white glass, milk boxes, batteries and cartons. There are different boxes for each one of them. In our municipality we have 40 of them, they are spread out all over our municipality.

Compost , how does it work?

At our home we have a bucket under our sink where we put our leftover vegetables, potato peel, fruit peel, coffee-grounds and tea-grounds. When the bucket is full we take it outside to a barrel that we have in our backyard. There are worms in the barrel who eats up the food. And after a long time we have a very fine soil.

Garbage cans

The garbage we can’t recycle we throw in a garbage can. The cans are in three different sizes;
80 l, 140 l and 190 l and the cans are green. Families buy different cans depending on how much garbage they have. The municipality pick up our garbage every other week.
A lot of batteries are very dangerous and contains lead, acid and some of the smaller batteries contains quicksilver and cadmium or lead. We have special boxes for batteries, called "battery boxes" we have them because of the dangerous contains of the batteries and to save the environment from dangerous subjects.

What does our school do for recycling?

We talked to the people who work in our school kitchen. We asked them what they do with all the food we throw away. The woman we spoke to told us that they sort out paper, plastic, glass and carton for recycling. 5 or 6 years ago all the leftovers from the school lunches were given to pigs. A rule the EU made forced the farmers who bought the food to boil it before they could give it to the pigs. This was to protect the pigs from getting bacterials. It gets more expensive to boil the food and therefor the farmers choose the cheaper alternative and due to this the school kitchen has to throw it all away.

Recycling questions

We handed out some questions about recycling to 30 students. Here are the questions and the results.

Do you recycle your milk boxes(In Sweden they are made of hard paper), and hand them in to the recycle station?
Do you recycle glass to the recycle station?
Do you sort out hard plastic and take it to the recycle station?
Do you recycle or burn your old paper or newspaper?
Do you recycle metal cans to the recycle station?
Do you put your batteries in the "battery box"?
Do you have a compost at your home?

Source: Environment 2001 Calendar from our Municipality