REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE

                Reduce, reuse, recycle. Reduce, reuse, recycle. We have been hearing this since we were little, but at the end of the day how many people really do recycle? Not nearly enough. During the Great Depression in the 1930’s and 1940’s recycling was a necessity for survival for most people. Goods were recycled such as metals and nylon to help with supporting the war efforts. Then you head down the timeline a few decades later in the 1970’s when we had the environmental movement, peace and love for mother earth.  It also marked the first Earth Day, April 22 1970. It was a way for people to become more educated and also to take a role in actually doing something wonderful for the environment and for the world. Another hope for this day was to obtain political support for an environmental reformation. Today is a new day and people need to become more aware. Luckily now we have laws that require mandatory recycling collections for our beloved garbage men to come to your house and collect your recycled goods. I suppose that means we are getting somewhere. We are still growing as a community to better our environment, but it just is not enough.

                The actual idea of recycling is a pretty simple concept. You have in your possession something that is no longer useful to you, so you reuse it and it turns into something else. If it’s that easy then why are we not doing anything about it? It is because we as a society like to make things more complicated or difficult for ourselves and it becomes a little more complex when you throw the environment, technology, politics, and what not into the equation. In the 1980’s, landfill usage was at its highest. Astronauts says that the most prominent features that they notice about Earth is the amount of these enormous landfills that they can see from space. American’s sent almost 150 million tons of garbage to the landfills every year. Today it has decreased by about 50 million.  Although they may be a more efficient way to get rid of garbage, spaces for landfills are running low. Then you begin to think about all the chemicals that goes into the landfills and all the chemicals that comes right back out in that soupy toxin called leachate. Dioxin is one of the most toxic manmade toxins. It is made by the incinerators when we burn our garbage before we throw into the landfill. By recycling, we can deplete about 32 percent of waste away from landfills which is the equivalent of over 60 million tons.

                Then of course there is the debate about conserving energy and whether or not recycling uses more or less energy. It is all on a case by case basis. If the garbage truck drives around using energy and polluting the earth with the fumes and gases from the car to drive around from Timbuktu and back collecting everyone’s recycled goods, then it does not really conserve energy, it almost balances it out. But then again, in retrospect it takes less energy to recycle a piece of plastic then it is to create a brand new one. It all depends on the situation at hand.

                My mother was always one for recycling, however back home in New Hampshire we had to do it ourselves. Everything was separated into different containers and then drive it all the way to the dump and then once again put all the contents into their individual spaces. A pain as it was, we still did it. It makes you feel better as a person at the end of the day. Text books say that the things you throw away go through a series of steps: extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and finally disposal. This is what we like to call the material’s economy. However, a lot is left out of this equation. It is because of the fact that, once again, we as a society are more complicated then this simple equation. All of these factors are tested against every day, real life situations with the economy, society or politics. The first step in this idea is extraction. Really, what we are doing is cutting down trees, using all the water supply, chopping into mountains to obtain the metals, and overall using our resources until they are completely run dry. We are running out of our resources. To put it into perspective, in the last three decades about one third of the world’s natural resource spaces have been used already. So therefore we think it is ok to go into someone else’s territory and take their resources for our use since we begin to run out of ours. Recycling reduces the garbage made in the end and it also reduces the pressure to harvest and mine at our resources until we have no more. If we simply reduced, reused, and recycled we would not have to go into another country and run them dry of their resources as well. We would simply be reusing ours. Think about this: The typical American uses about seven trees a year in items made from trees such as paper or wood. This is the equivalent to two billion trees used by Americans alone in one year. Last time I checked, I’m pretty sure that we needed those for something. Oh yes, that’s right breathing.

                It’s all about demand. The more we as a society demands, the more these producers are going to make. The problem with this is that when a product goes into its production phase, chemicals and toxins in the form of pollution are sent into our atmosphere the air that we breathe. As previously stated, it takes less energy to recycle something instead of making a brand new version of it from scratch. In the United States, all the industries put together create about four billion pounds of toxic chemicals that are put into the air a year.  What is amazing about this is the fact that just about anything and everything can be recycled or reused in one way or another. You can recycle everything from batteries to clothing, glass to metals. Iron and steel are the world’s most recycled materials. Recycling aluminum saves about 95 percent of the energy cost for creating brand new aluminum. Tires can be recycled and then reused as the safety rubber floor for a child’s playground. Recycling is everywhere, it is all about the people in society to take a stand and do something about. Save our resources and move onto something that can help our planet out just a little bit more.