Visit the EPA's Recycle City

Click on the following buildings to view the recycling efforts at that location:

• School
• Shaq's Garage
• Widget Manufacturing Company

Complete the following activity in your notes:

Name three ways each site contributes to the "reduce, reuse, and recycle" efforts of Recycle City. Compare your answers to those listed below:

• School - Interactive popup. Assistance may be required.

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  • Recycle City students are holding a paper recycling drive to pay for a class trip. (For every ton of paper they recycle, the students save 17 trees from being cut down to make new paper.) Besides bringing used paper from home, they turn in the writing, drawing, and computer paper they use at school.
  • The students are collecting old sneakers in another bin. Really old sneakers are sent to a sneaker maker so the rubber can be removed and melted down for reuse. Shoes that are still in good condition are donated to kids who need them.
  • Recycle City students also operate an ongoing recycling program that collects cans and glass bottles used at lunch time. In addition to regular collection sites inside, they set up an easy drop-off point in the school parking lot to collect donations from parents and the community. The money collected from this program helped pay for the computers in the school library.
  
• Shaq's Garage - Interactive popup. Assistance may be required.

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  • Worn-out tires don't need to be thrown away. Shaq does two things to keep old tires going. First, he sends good tires that are still safe for use on the road to a tire company to be reconditioned. These retreads can be put back on the car and driven safely for many more miles. Second, when old tires can't be put back into shape, Shaq collects them and passes them on to companies that reprocess them. Old tires can be shredded or melted down and used to help make other materials, such as asphalt to pave roads or playground surfaces to make them safer.
  • Shaq's Garage has special equipment for recycling antifreeze. Shaq uses special equipment because, even though antifreeze is biodegradable, it is poisonous and has some environmentally harmful ingredients, like lead. (Antifreeze is also known as coolant, because it not only keeps car engines from freezing, it also keeps them from getting too hot.)
  • The gasoline that Shaq sells to his customers is stored in tanks under the ground. When his station was built, Shaq used double-lined tanks to protect the environment if the tanks ever leaked. Double lining means that there are two layers of metal between the gasoline and the soil, so there is less chance that a leak would contaminate the soil and groundwater beneath the earth's surface.
  
• Widget Manufacturing Company - Interactive popup. Assistance may be required.

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  Some Possible Answers:
  
  • Corrugated boxes are a major source of waste in industry. Willie, one of the Widget workers, found that boxes returned from customers could be reused and repackaged up to five times before recycling them. Now, Widget Manufacturing offers to pay for shipping if its customers return the packaging. So far, Willie's idea has saved the company $95,000.
  • With the combined efforts of Widget plants across the country, Widget workers saved 2.9 million pounds of wood by collecting wooden shipping pallets. Then, they either returned pallets to suppliers, sold them, or repaired broken pallets so they could be used again.
  • Rosy and Tyrone set up a widget repair station for fixing broken or worn-down widgets. Now, customers bring in worn widgets for replacement parts and leave with a widget that's good as new. Widget fixing not only saves energy and resources by extending the life of a widget, it also keeps customers happy.