Recycling: it's easy being green

What can be recycled?

It is amazing how many things in our world can be recycled. Recyclable materials can come from your house, favourite restaurant and neighbourhood supermarket, or they can come from a steel mill or a demolition site. Materials that are left over in a factory when new products are manufactured can also be recycled. These recyclable materials have value because they can be re-used as feedstock in the manufacture of new products.

On a regular basis, Steel Pacific Recycling collects and processes old automobiles, farm equipment, ships, refrigerators, stoves, buildings and bridges, batteries, empty beverage containers, airplanes, bicycles, computers and much, much more! It’s easy to see how so much of what we use in our day-to-day lives can be diverted from the waste stream and recycled into new products.

How much of a difference do we make? Well, if the materials we currently handle went into the landfills on Vancouver Island, they would each have to process about 50% more waste (by weight) than they currently do. And that means our landfills would fill up a lot faster.

To put it another way – every year we handle the equivalent of over 400 lbs. of material for every man, woman and child on Vancouver Island.

And here’s another interesting statistic. Each year we recycle enough steel to fill up the BC Place Stadium, enough aluminum to build over 450 new Twin Otter airplanes (without motors) and we recycle enough cars to frame almost 4,000 new 2,000 sq.ft. homes using metal studs.