In some websites, recycling is smeared as a fool's errand and an insignificant factor to the environment. Of course, the cabals who impugn the usefulness of recycling are also the same ones, in general, who gained the most from doing business with wanton contempt for the environment. Just what is recycling and how significant is it to the planet and to all of us? Let's review some important recycling facts, as soon as we are clear about the meaning of recycling.
"Recycling involves processing used materials into new products to prevent waste of potentially useful materials."
Recycling saves energy and materials by trimming down the demand for fresh material for production. It also serves to sustain the environment by reducing garbage and pollution. It reduces the discharge of warming gases to the atmosphere by decreasing incineration of refuse and the utilization of fossil fuel for manufacturing and transport.
Recycling facts about plastic
In 1862, plastic was awarded as a useful and revolutionary breakthrough at the London World's Fair. Over the years, however, our view cocerning plastic has undergone a drastic switch. It is now considered to be a serious pollutant due to its durability, it requires hundreds of years to completely dissolve plastic. The plastic garbage deposited in our landfills or bobbing in the earth's oceans, will be there long after our time is gone.
Envion, a company from Washington D.C., in the U.S., recently revealed a new plant that's supposed to transform plastic refuse into fuel. If this is correct, it could emerge to be the answer to the environment's plastic pollution dilemma. With this technology, it will become profitable for corporations to mine waste dumps and the oceans for plastic to satisfy the industrial society's hunger for more fuel and energy.
Collectively, we use and discard 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour! Recycling just 26 of these bottles could produce one polyester suit!
Plastic bags and other plastic debris that are thrown in our oceans kill a million sea creatures yearly. Bisphenol-A, a known hormonal disruptor found in some plastic, is now found in the system of thousands of persons, particularly those whose basic diet consist of seafoods, leading to abortions. It's said to be twice the size of the state of Texas and holds as much as 100 million tons of plastic debris. Due to the action of the sun and sea water, the plastic in this area is breaking down into shrapnel-like pieces and are eaten by fish and other ocean creatures, which we eat - the plastic we carelessly cast off has come back through the food chain to torment us all.
Recycling facts about paper
Broadsheets like The New York Times or The Washington Post, or your local hometown Gazette are worrying that sales have been inexorably declining in the past few years as readers are now obtaining their news from the internet. The paperless Information Age may be bad news to our archaic news dailies, but it's certainly a welcome gift to the rain forests.
Here's the inconvenient truth about the broadsheet and glossy magazine you buy every weekend: 500 thousand trees we're hewn down to manufacture the paper needed for the weekend issue of all newspapers in this country.
If we reuse just one in ten of the newspapers we buy and throw away afterward, we'd prevent the cutting of 25,000,000 trees annually. The best option, nix all subscriptions NOW or subscribe via RSS only to the internet edition of your top newspaper.
Recycling facts about metal
Like plastic, aluminum is also extremely durable and will persist in the landfill for ages. An aluminum container dumped in a landfill right now will persist on as the same aluminum container for the next a thousand years! The aluminum cans we trash every year is enough to rebuild the whole US commercial air fleet three times over.
Annually, Americans require approximately 80,000,000,000 pieces of aluminum soda containers, and most of these are dumped in our landfills.
Recycling a single aluminum soda can is equal to storing electricity that's enough to light up a 100-watt bulb for twenty hours, run a Mac for three hours, or view Miley Cyrus on TV for three hours.
Some people declare that recycling at this time is both uneconomical and impractical. They advise that we place all garbage in landfills now and save this for technology to be figured out that would make it more systematic and economical to dig up landfills and clean up the oceans for all the accrued garbage, and recycle these into fresh materials for us. I sure look forward to that day, but in the meantime, we have to deal with litter, dearth of materials, carbon gases, and overflowing dump sites. It's our planet - no one else will defend it, there's just us. Let's recycle today, and educate ourselves about recycling facts in our libraries and on the internet.
