Recycling

It seems like every day there are more and more news stories about the environment. I recently completed an assignment with my environmental science class that posed the following questions to my students. 1. Calculate how much money is saved by reducing a certain amount of waste via recycling. 2. Calculate how much energy is conserved by reusing or recycling.
I told students that they should probably focus on Aluminum cans to make their quest easier. The results varied and they were astounding! Some students actually concluded that certain types of recycling save much less energy then processing virgin material (in some cases only 8%). Other students concluded that certain types of recycling could potentially do more harm then good. Overall we all agreed that conservation, reuse and recycling are positive things but never the less the assignment was very enlightening.