Global warming has become the hot topic of the news in this day and age. It has become the salient point of sustainability everywhere from small conservationist organizations to the White House. Global warming has become topical in recent years because of how rapidly the temperature is actually rising. This affects wildlife and vegetation globally. Among all the debate and discussion over all of this is the question: “How do we stop it?” A simple solution to one of the most significant contributors to global warming is to re-emphasize something we’ve all been taught since elementary school: to reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Recycling is the process of taking a given product at the end of its useful life and using all or part of it to make another product. Recycling means using the core components of an old product as raw material to manufacture new goods. To reuse is to keep the materials out of the waste stream and to simply use them again. Reducing means to prevent use of nonrenewable materials from the get-go rather than to handle these problems down the road. Recycling is the easiest way that you, as a consumer, can help out the environment, create a profitable market for recycled goods and help preserve natural resources from being depleted.
If we do not reduce, reuse, and recycle, then pollution will overwhelm the earth and corrupt its natural capital (its land, air, and seas). Climate change will heighten sea levels which will ultimately sink much coastal land underwater. Climate change will make earth’s temperature unbearably warm as well. The ozone layer will be damaged if too many greenhouse gases and too much carbon dioxide enters into the atmosphere. This will allow harmful UV rays to take its toll on human and animal flesh, and increase the temperature of the earth even more.
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According to National Geographic, 91% of all plastic each year is not recycled. This means the majority of this plastic is dumped into landfills and then burned rather than recycled. Burning this plastic not only releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the air but also toxic chemicals within plastic not meant to be released into the atmosphere. Trees and rainforests are being cut down faster than they can naturally grow back, thanks to businesses who don’t recycle paper and logging companies who do not replant enough trees.
Recycling is a very easy and effective way to slow down climate change. Recycling is very good for the economy as well, because recycling makes it easy for companies to produce goods without needing to continually exhaust earth’s limited resources. However, people tend to be very busy and utterly lazy at times, and refuse to go the extra few feet to recycle, or to pay a few dollars each month to have a curbside-recycling at their own homes. People are more likely to recycle when it is convenient and cheap. For example, if a given person is in a hurry to get to work, and he or she is walking to his or her office from a lunch break, then he or she will often look for the closest bin to dispose of their trash, which is more often than not a trash can. Even if said trash could be recycled, it will become trash regardless.
The importance of recycling is irrefutable, and a plethora of studies and articles have been created in order to emphasize the necessity of recycling. America in particular recycles much of their waste, but not nearly enough, and therefore, is a very wasteful nation. In fact, Americans produce 523,074,200,000 pounds of trash collectively every year (Worldometers, 2018). 75% of the American waste stream is recyclable, but we only recycle about 30% of this waste.
This is an enormous problem because recycling just one aluminum can save enough energy to listen to a full album on an iPod, and recycling 100 cans could light your bedroom for two whole weeks (DoSomething.org, 2018). A glass container can go from a recycling bin to a store shelf in as few as 30 days, which no doubt helps the economy as well as the environment. Over 87% of Americans have access to curbside or drop-off paper recycling programs (DoSomething.org, 2018), yet less than ⅓ of recyclables are actually recycled because of lack of care and effort on the part of the citizens.
As our planet’s temperature increases annually, so does the need to prevent climate change. The easiest and simplest way that people can contribute to fighting global warming is recycling. Throughout homes, businesses, schools, etc. we see that familiar blue can, which is for the most part, neglected. Recycling is one of the easiest ways to alleviate the effects of global warming, yet at the same time one of the most ignored ways. In return for this lack of effort, we are destroying our own planet and only hurting ourselves.
References
- National Geographic – Global Warming Overview
- NASA – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – Recycling and Waste Management
- World Wildlife Fund – Deforestation and Climate Change
- Greenpeace – Climate Change Campaigns
- Science Magazine – Climate Change Research
- United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – The Paris Agreement
- NASA Earth Observatory – Earth’s Energy Balance and Global Warming
