Why should metals be reused?
Answers
1. To preserve natural resources: Recycling metal substitutes the need to produce virgin metal. In turn, this preserves precious natural resources like coal and iron ore, which are used in the production of metals. ... Recycling metals also requires less energy than producing new metals.
Explanation:
The scrap metal recycling industry consumes a lot less energy as well as being more efficient than actually extracting and refining raw materials through traditional mining processes. Mining has a number of environmental processes such as environmental hazards, poisonous runoffs, groundwater pollution or create physical scars on the environment that can take hundreds of years for the environment to heal, causing groundwater pollution, habitat destruction and unstable geological conditions.
Recycling scrap metal requires fossil fuel inputs as well and is regarded as less energy-intensive than mining. This does not cause groundwater pollution or create physical scars on the environment which can take hundreds of years to recover. Recycling plants don’t need massive open-pit mines to function.
The mining and processing of new metal releases a much larger amount of greenhouse gas emissions as compared to recycling metals. These emissions tend to influence climate change in a negative way as well as causing harmful air pollution in the cities, which can lead to respiratory health problems for you and other city dwellers.