For many years people, particularly in the developed

Some of these will have found their way to second hand dealers, but the general assumption has been that such goods were 'waste' and once they no longer worked and were at the end of their useful life they would often end up in a landfill site. Americans use over 100 million steel cans and over 200 million aluminium beverage cans every day so at the same time landfill sites have grown to immense proportion. A combination of increased awareness of the environment and the current global economic crisis that began in 2008 has given added impetus to the movement to recycle, re-use and preserve. There are now recycling centres in every state of the USA from Georgia to Alaska, New England to California. Waste recycling makes economic and environmental sense. As the global population has grown, demand for raw materials has increased and the stock of the earth's minerals and other materials has been diminishing. Recycling metal by melting it down takes a lot less energy than it does to produce new metal., using recycled metal reuses CO2 emissions and air pollution, while less water is used and less water is polluted. The definition of waste is something that has been used and cannot be recycled or re-used so that there is no other place for it than the rubbish. This does not apply to many of the goods mentioned above, which contain a combination of materials and parts, many of which could be recycled if they were dismantled and sorted into categories of materials such as ferrous and non ferrous metals, separating aluminium scrap from copper, zinc and other metals. Scrap metal companies are therefore actually waste recycling companies and also big businesses contributing a significant amount of money to the economy by creating jobs, paying taxes and carrying out a valuable service of collecting, sorting and then selling on the various materials to other companies that will process them into a re-usable form. The recycling industry alone employs almost a half million people. It has been calculated that the USA recycles 1.5 million tons of copper scrap, 2.5 million tons of aluminium, 1.3 million tons and 300,000 tons of zinc scrap each year and that the scrap metal and associated industries making them worth $90 billion a year. Looked at this way scrap metal companies are actually the pioneers of the recycling industry and playing their part in the preservation of the planet and its natural resources. Non-Ferrous metals are metals which do not contain Iron. For example, metals such as copper and aluminum are non-ferrous and play an important role in the components of many modern products. Products like computer wiring and soda cans are inexpensive partly due to the role of the secondary metals industry. We keep costs low because the mining ofthese metal s is more expensive and less efficient .