Every day, we flush our toilets and wash our hands (hopefully), but after the water flows into our sinks and through our pipes, we never think about what happens to it. However, there are many complex processes that go into recycling water and a lot of other things that go into cleaning plastics from the ocean. At ReCharged, we don’t do these, but we do recycle electronic waste by donating it to families in need.

How Water Gets Recycled

Predictably, recycling water begins with filtering it. The solids are taken out, then microorganisms that are normally found in rivers eat away at tiny particles that are too small to see. They eat until they’re full, then they sink to the bottom and do not go through with the rest of the water. This water is filtered extremely finely, treated with chemicals to disinfect it, and used to water plants or for other commercial uses. Microfiltration and reverse osmosis are both extra processes that purify the water even further. Microfiltration uses substances with extremely small pores to filter through, but reverse osmosis uses membranes with even smaller pores and pressurizes the water at 800 psi to force it through the membranes. Reverse osmosis is the best filtering process as of today, but more processes will likely be developed in the future.

Cleaning up the Ocean

As all of us know, the ocean is constantly being polluted with plastic, adding to the millions of pounds of plastic already in there. Most of the pollution in the ocean comes from rivers, which can be filtered through trash-collecting boats. However, getting rid of the plastic that is already in the ocean is fairly difficult. The Ocean Cleanup is an organization that is experimenting with machines to do this. They have already set up tons of boats in rivers, but in the ocean, cleaning up plastic is much harder. Their boats can only clean up plastic floating on the surface of the ocean, fish and other organisms get caught in it easily, and they can’t do anything about the billions of plastics and microplastics below the surface. Even with that, though, they have removed over 200,000 pounds of trash from the ocean’s surface. But the best way to help the planet is just to recycle and save resources yourself. Just like how recycling electronic waste can help families in need, recycling plastic does a big part in keeping the ocean clean, and it really isn’t that difficult.