You probably throw a milk container in the recycling, put the bins out on collection day and forget about it. It is worth noting that the landfill-happy United States is far worse at recycling than other major economies. But just because recycling doesn’t work very well in the United States doesn’t mean it can’t be done well. Recycling steel, for example, saves 72 percent of the energy of producing new steel; it also cuts water use by 40 percent. Even anti-plastics campaigners agree that recycling plastics, like PET, is better for the climate than burning them — a likely outcome if recycling efforts were to be abandoned.

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Organizations: Environmental Protection Agency, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, University of Southampton Locations: United States, Canada, Mexico, India, Malaysia, America, States, England