Are Wood Products Recyclable?

The term “recycling” conjures up thoughts of aluminum, plastic, glass, and paper. A recyclable commodity that may get overlooked is wood.

Wood recycling, consisting both of raw wood and used wood products, as well as paper, and has become more of a focus in the past decade. We don’t normally think of recycling a natural, renewable resource, but considering the staggering statistics, it is more than necessary.

 

The downside of wood recycling is that some curbside recycling programs don’t yet accept wood, but by not recycling wood, we are depleting an extremely important natural resource.

What is Green Power?

Much of the modern world relies on some kind of power source for a multitude of things such as lights, heat, and entertainment sources like televisions and computers. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “The U.S. energy supply is composed of a wide variety of energy resources; however, not all energy resources have the same environmental benefits and costs.”

Conventional power is achieved by the combustion, or burning, of fossil fuels such as natural gas, coal, and oil. “Fossil fuels have environmental costs from mining, drilling, or extraction, and emit greenhouse gases and air pollution during combustion.” (EPA)

What is Gasification?

“Gasification is a technology that has been widely used in commercial applications for more than 50 years. It’s a method to extract energy from materials by converting carbonaceous materials into synthesis gas (syngas). This syngas is itself a fuel or it can be used as a renewable-energy resource.”

“Gasifiers operate at 3,000-4,000°F, using a thermo-chemical conversion process that does not include enough oxygen for the materials to burn. Instead the materials are broken down at the molecular level and then reformed into reusable products.”

Anaerobic Digestion

“Anaerobic digestion is a biological process that produces a gas principally composed of methane and carbon dioxide, otherwise known as biogas. 

These gases are produced from organic wastes such as livestock manure, food processing waste, etc.

The process of anaerobic digestion consists of three steps: 

Biodiesel As A Renewable Energy Source

Biodiesel is a derivative of vegetable sources such as soybean oil and is similar to diesel fuel. It can also be made from recycled cooking oil and animal fats.

All major engine manufacturers’ warranties cover the use of biodiesel fuels, most often in blends of up to 5 percent or 20 percent biodiesel.

Plants in nearly every state in the country produce biofuel. Its production has increased from approximately 25 million gallons in the early 2000s to almost 1.1 billion gallons in 2012. “This represents a small but growing component of the annual U.S. on-road diesel market of about 35 billion to 40 billion gallons.”

Biomass As An Alternative Energy Source

Biomass is a term referring to all organic matter that has stored energy through the process of photosynthesis, the process used by plants and other organisms to convert light energy from the sun into chemical energy that can be later released to fuel the organism’s activities and functions.
 
Since plants live and grow they are, by definition, a renewable resource. Biomass is one of the most plentiful sources of renewable energy in the world. In the past two decades it has been second only to the use of hydropower in the generation of electricity.

Solar Power As a Renewable Energy Source

Solar energy is a vital part of life. It was the first source of energy in the world; used even before humans knew how to start a fire. It lights the Earth, provides heat, helps to grow crops, influences weather patterns, and is used to produce solar electricity. Without solar energy, life could not be supported on Earth; on land or at sea.

Solar is the first energy source in the world. It was in use much earlier before humans even learn how to light a fire.

Solar electricity differs from solar energy in that solar electricity has to be harnessed and converted into energy by relying on man-made devices, such as solar panels or solar cells in order to provide the clean, harmless, low-cost, renewable energy that is available to us every single day.

Water As A Renewable Energy Source

Water as a source of power and energy it not a new concept. The use of water current to accomplish such tasks as grinding grain at a mill dates back hundreds of years.

Power from water, called hydro power or hydroelectric power, is yet another renewable source of energy. Since water is about 800 times denser than air, even a slow flowing stream of water can yield considerable amounts of energy. 

Wind as a Renewable Energy Source

Renewable energy resources are generally defined as energy that comes from resources which are naturally replenished on a human timescale such as wind, sunlight, geothermal heat, and water in the form of rain, and tides, waves.
 
Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form of energy, such as using wind turbines to produce electrical power, windmills for mechanical power. Wind has been recognized as a source of energy, in some capacity, for several hundred years. People used wind as the sole power source for boats, to pump water, or grind grain.

Are We Throwing Away A Renewable Resource?

Deep inside a landfill among the trash and debris lie airless pockets filled with the by-product of decomposing waste; a gas rich in methane. Some areas in landfills, or entire landfills themselves, may be a poor source of methane due to the type of waste buried there. Construction debris, for example, is dry and will not rot, whereas yard waste and food scraps will be consumed by bacteria and decompose in such a way that produces a plethora of methane gas.  When bacteria overtake the rotting waste this gas is given off and, when harnessed, can be a valuable source of energy for things such as heat and electricity. This certainly spurs on this side of the landfill vs garbage disposal debate discussed in a previous article aptly titled, “The Garbage Disposal Debate”.