Today is National Recycling Day! National Recycling Day began as Texas Recycles Day in 1994 and became America Recycles Day in 1997. Recycling is an important part of keeping our environment healthy by ensuring that our waste gets put back into the economy rather than into the landfill. However, recycling isn’t as simple as tossing random things into the recycling bin. The material that goes into recycling plants is sorted, but the sorting is never perfect. Recycling plants sell recycled material to companies in compressed rectangular prisms called bales, and bales that are too contaminated are sent to the landfill. The current IB ESS students learned this and more during their field trip to the Republic Recycling Plant on November 9th! Here are some recycling tips that they learned:

• Ensure that all plastics are empty, clean, and dry
• Do not recycle cardboard (such as pizza boxes) that is contaminated with food
• Do not recycle packaging such as plastic bags; they get tangled in recycling equipment
• Recycle plastic water bottles with the caps on to ensure that they don’t fall off and get stuck in equipment

For more information, visit https://www.cctexas.com/howtorecycle!