Recycling Center

Good day, SE students! In this week's class we will work on recycling; we'll complete the sentence writing, listening, and the questions/answers. Then we will focus on the designs; I hope to be able to at least start them this week. This unit's project - design your own recycling center. Here, you have to first think what you will recycle - a new completely new product (using parts from old or outdated products, recycled parts recreated, or newly manufactured parts from old materials) OR a new item re-purposed or re-created into a new and useful item.

Recycling centers are numerous throughout the world, and although the aim may be obvious, the operation is not always. Many recycled products take many steps to produce, so your centers should be at least 5 stages. This could include the intake stage, the crushing stage, the melting stage, the fabrication stage, and the shipping stage for example. In other words, you should design a fully operational/functional recycling center capable of recycling, re-manufacturing, or re-purposing your item now and for many years into the future. Look ahead, think deeply, be creative, and have fun.

Recycling!

Modern recycling is a very important process in saving energy, and can be considered a plus to environmental sustainability. Why do I say this? Well, RE- means to do something again. A cycle is the circular motion of an object or an idea.Therefore, after using something, we change it back into its previous form or into a new form altogether, saving energy that is used to make the original item. In addition, have you ever considered that energy can be created through the process of recycling itself? Want to know how? Well then, go out there and find out how!

So what is modern recycling? Well, it's a process containing two main streams. One stream is to make something new from something old, such as making new pet bottles from old, used bottles. The second stream is to use something old or used for a new and different purpose, such as making pencil holders from tin cans or making bags from old pairs of jeans. This process is often called re-purposing, and it is a different, yet very important and functional, form of recycling.

The reason we need to recycle things that the energy needed to manufacture things in the first place is vast, and can be a drain on many parts of the environment that we don't even see. Dirty water is offloaded into streams. Exhaust fumes cause acid rain and air pollution. And the list goes on. The ideal way to make things in this day and age is to take old products and re-use them rather than using dirty resources, such as oil, and sparse natural resources, such as trees, for making new products. If we were to use dirty resources continually  or cut down trees continually for making new products, our earth would soon become barren, dirty, and would soon break down. Therefore, recycling is very necessary for the future of our planet. The big blue marble, planet earth.

Alternative Energy

Alternative energy sources swing with the wind these days, no pun intended. (A pun is a short joke based on words). What I mean by the first sentence is that many different kinds of alternative energy sources are discovered almost daily, some by accident, many by design. In fact, the reading in our books covered a group in England who discovered cars can run on cooking oil. In middle America, small farms use cooking oil, and other forms of reusable fuel sources such as methane related products and biomass energy sources, to run equipment. Composting toilets and other compost can be used for fuel as well, after being cleaned, of course.

We have also seen other alternative energy sources of late: wave energy, foot power energy, bicycle pedal energy, wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal energy, and the list is far from over. However, which of these will stay and which will go remains a question that will long be held into the future. One thing is for sure - most of these sources are cleaner than the nasty coal we still have at hand today. I'll bet we will keep using coal into the future, even though it has many shortcomings. Let's hope not, though.

In the next class we will further our talk about alternative energy sources and you will tackle the very question that may just solve our dirty energy problem, and that is, what kind of energy sources are good and clean enough to spend time and money developing? Hey, the answer might just be with you!