Most People Do Not Understand Why Recycling Is Essential
Nowadays all we hear about is how we need to recycle everything to save our environment from peril. Do we really have to do this? Well, consider this statistic: the average plastic shopping bag takes more or less 1,000 years to entirely decay in a land fill site. Don’t forget, you’re simply talking about one shopping bag so that’s a very long time. Estimate the number of trash bags you use each year on top of those plastic shopping bags.
You’re talking about a great deal of plastic bags when you multiply that number by the number of people living in our country. A good idea would be to recycle the shopping bag instead of letting it sit in the landfill slowly decomposing. Hundreds of things are recycled these days, for instance old worn tires are chopped down and used as tread for playgrounds and shopping bags made of plastic can be remade into clothing. Almost anything can be reused.
Fifteen years ago, the town of Lemoore, California instituted a very strict recycling program. Residents of Lemoore who did not comply with the rules of recycling were fined. Majority of the town residents decided to comply and the town benefited immensely from recycling. A new water park and a new playground were constructed. Recycling likewise helped to fund basic municipal requisites, such as a police department, a fire station and funding for children attending pre-school. Thus, you can understand that recycling can earn money for other things as well as bring down the amount of rubbish going to the landfill.
Most likely, you feel that you as a single person can’t make a huge difference by your recycling but just think about how much the world would change if everyone did some recycling. We would not need such huge landfills, which would save operating expenses and preserve the terrain. In addition, recycling can help to raise money for poor areas while benefiting the environment. We all come out a winner.
Even if you don’t care about the environment, try to think of others; not only human beings but also animals. Global warming and other environmental problems are killing wildlife as well as harming the planet. You can help to preserve the planet and leave a healthy planet for your children by doing a bit of recycling.
Perhaps you don’t see how long it actually takes each item you discard to rot. You may recall that a plastic bag does not decompose until nearly 1000 years later. An expendable diaper will take approximately 400 years, a milk bottle could take 500 years, a glass jar could take a massive one million years and Styrofoam (that stuff your takeouts are in) may possibly never rot! There’s no reason to toss these items when they are recyclable.
Evidently, there are some things we can’t recycle today, but with the technology becoming even more advanced we might find new ways of recycling and new uses of different materials. For now, there’s simply no reason we can’t recycle plastics, metals, and glass. It’s easy and doesn’t cost you anything so why not help save our planet? We could do a lot of good if everyone chose to help.