REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE

Lauren Dow

       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. Records of recycling go all the way back to Plato in 400 B.C.  Whenever resources were scarce, there was depletion in waste build up in their waste dumps. During the Great Depression in the 1930’s and 1940’s recycling was a necessary means for survival for many people. Goods such as metals and nylon were recycled to help support 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 about the earth we live on 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 of the reality of things such as this. We spend too much time ignoring these things and acting like it does not affect us when in all actuality it affects us daily. Luckily now we have laws that require mandatory recycling collections for our beloved garbage men to come to your house and collect all your recycled goods. There are three different types of collections for recycling: drop-off centres, buy-back centres, and curbside collections. They also have mandatory collection laws that have a way target the big cities to recycle more.  The law will state the amount of goods needed from the city’s particular waste stream to be recycled and it is each cities responsibility to meet this goal. The hardest job we have is to take the little blue or green container out to the end of the driveway, yet we could not be lazier.  There is also the container deposit legislation which states that certain containers that people turn in such as bottles will result in a refund of some sort of money. I remember going to the dump and turning in huge boxes filled with soda cans and getting about five cents per can to make money. Here in the United States, recycling facilities earn about $2,981 million each year in revenue from people recycling. I suppose that with our limited laws this means we are getting somewhere. We are still growing as a community to better our environment, but it is just 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 that could be useful to you now. If it is 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 then it really needs to be. On top of that it also becomes a little more complex when you throw the environment, technology, or politics, into the equation and our minds begin to wander. In the 1980’s, landfill usage was at its highest. Astronauts say that one of the most prominent features that they notice about Earth when they see it from space is the amount of enormous landfills taking up Earth’s sacred land and sea. Americans send almost 150 million tons of garbage to the landfills every year. Today it has decreased by about 50 million, but that is still a lot.  Although that 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 go into these landfills and all the chemicals that pours right back out in that soupy toxin called leachate. Dioxin is one of the most poisonous 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 the 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 that particular truck 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. Economically speaking there is also a debate as to if it is efficient or not. There are many benefits to recycling and how it helps the economy. For instance, it cuts down on the landfill costs. There was actually a study that was performed by the Technical University of Denmark that showed that about 83 percent of the cases studied showed that recycling was a more efficient means of disposing their waste. What is economically frustrating is the fact that there are taxes and other internal externalities that give the companies and industries the ability to ignore these costs imposed on us and will go forth with the production of pollution.

            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 at home and then we would drive it all the way to the dump. Once we got there we then had to put all the contents into their individual spaces. The sorting can be done by hand, however there are these machines that do it automatically called Single Streams. There has been a thirty percent increase in the act of recycling in areas where these plants are found. A pain as it was to have to travel back and forth to the dump weekly, we still did it because we knew it was good for our environment. It even makes you feel better as a person at the end of the day and who would not want that. 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 these five steps are not the complete works of this process. It is because of the fact that, once again, we like to make everything a little more complicated then they need to be. 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. We say that we are using resources to meet the demands of people. 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 just to make people happy. If we keep doing this then eventually we will run out of 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 alright 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 all of our resources and other’s 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 of two billion trees used by Americans alone in one year. Last time I checked, I am pretty sure that we needed those for something. Oh yes, that’s right breathing.

            If you think about it, It seems to be all about demand. The more people demand, 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.  Think of all the green house gases and other pollutants from the incineration. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the times during the production phase of a product, recycling after the use of the product is hardly ever taken into consideration. This makes it difficult for recycling purposes, but that does not mean that you cannot reuse the product. The idea of sustainable design was meant to help fix this problem. Sustainable design is basically the act of designing products that are helpful to the environment during and after the use of that product.

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. Whenever a building takes a wrecking ball to the ground, the left over concrete from the site is put into a machine that crushes it and it is reused for new construction site. Clothing can be recycled or if not, then reused by donating them for someone else to use. When glass bottles or jars are collected on the recycle rounds, they are taken and reused for new glass bottles or jar. It can also be used as a product called grassphalt. This is a material used in the production of roads and is made by about thirty percent glass. Paper is difficult to recycle because each time it is recycled the quality decreases and more fibers must be added to it. What is even harder is trying to recycle paper that has a plastic, aluminum, or wax covering over it, such as gift wrapping paper or wax paper. It requires more work to do this and costs more money so therefore it is not done as much. In some places it is banned to directly dispose of items such as computers or cell phones due to all of the toxins that are in them. In this case all of the parts must be taken out and separated for proper recycling. 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.

If you jump down the line to the disposal factor, that is when the responsibility leaves the governments hands and put into the people’s hands. We have already made the act of consuming and purchasing our goods so the idea of reducing and reusing is out the window. So once everything is used up to meet our needs, we throw it away. We forget about recycling, we forget about conserving, and we just toss it. Personally, I believe that it is because we are lazy and just simply do not care because we think that it does not actually affect us. You can make your own conclusions.

 Graded by Scott

2,981 million -  Im not sure how much this exactly is.  You had a very informative essay and growing up in Michigan I remember going to the landfills too.  It was a little bit of an inconvienance, especially in the winter, but it's something that impacts you forever and will be passed on to your kids.  Some of your sentances had the word "and" used too many times and could be made into two sentances.  Maybe using a comma would make it flow better but it was still a very good essay.  To make your essay a little longer you could have mentioned exactly what green house gases are and what the potential dangers it has on us.  Overall good essay and I enjoyed reading it.

Rhetorical Knowledge       Critical Thinking          Writing and reading            Process          Knowledge of Conventions          GRAND TOTAL:

             5                                   5                                      3                                     5                                  5                                                 23/25