Is Recycling Worth it?
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Next Steps?
After reading this article, I am starting to realize that us humans can be very lazy. Just the fact that people are complaining about separating garbage from recycled materials is ridiculous to me. A very viable solution to this problem is to just make people do their job and actually separate garbage from recycled materials. Their argument about the bins becoming too big has a very simple solution; have smaller bins. With smaller recycling bins, we can not only easily determine garbage from recycling materials but we can also make recycling more efficient considering that it is easier to spot a blue bin and throwing whatever you think is recyclable into these said bins. We can also set up regulations on these and actually make it required to throw recycled materials into bins and to separate garbage.
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SummaryUs americans generate about 254 million tons of trash. Out of these tons of trash, we recycle and compost about 87 million tons of this material. This makes about 34.3% of trash to be recycled materials. There are many benefits to recycling. For example, recycling eliminate about 186 million metric tons of carbon dioxide which is like taking 39 million cars off the road. The most recycled material currently being recycled is aluminum. This is very beneficial both financially as well an environmentally. We not only save aluminum but we also save 97 percent of energy needed to make a can. There is a problem with this however. Because recycling has become so efficient, our recycling bins have gotten bigger. This leads to a greater chance of garbage contaminating these bins as well as its becoming more of a chore to separate these recycled materials from the garbage. It is becoming more of an economic issue considering it takes more time to separate the trash.
Reflection
This article was very eye opening and made me realize that there are times where something that we think is good can actually not be as good as we thought it was. I always looked at recycling as a good solution to our environmental issue that is the fact that we are taking too much from our environment. But, after reading this, it is very surprising to read about how we are actually starting to make recycling more of a chore. The main reason why i chose this article was because our APES class focus on making our environment better but something that was once considered helpful is actually dangerous economically to us humans. I believe that recycling should be something that is very easy and primarily effortless but now reading about the fact that we are needing actual facilities just for this is a bit too excessive.
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