By: Erika Tejada and Betzy Antonio
You’re feeling hungry, you look at the clock and see that it is 11:25. You rush out of class, but need to dispose of your empty water bottle. All you want to do is head for the lunch line, so you toss it from afar, hoping you make it into one of the bins. Unaware of throwing the bottle in the wrong bin, you quickly rush to the lunch line. Now the bottle you threw will be left in the wrong bin and will create future complications.
The benefits of recycling are innumerable, yet individuals refuse to commit to the cause and recycle. Some of the global impacts that recycling has are reduced landfill sites, minimized energy consumption, reduced pollution, and more jobs. Recycling is an easy way to help planet earth and takes very little effort.
Everything you put in the normal trash bin is collected and taken to a landfill where it will take years to decompose. During this process, the landfill emits gases and by-products that harm the environment. These landfill gases are 50% Carbon dioxide and 50% methane, which is 36x more potent in causing global warming than CO2. Though this happens to most trash, not all waste is biodegradable, meaning there will be trash in the landfills that won’t just decompose, this is the waste that should have been in the recycling bin. Trash in the wrong bin is an easy fix, but it requires awareness on the part of the person who disposes the waste. A simple google search can tell you what belongs in the blue, black, and green bins.
When you do throw your waste in the correct bin, the waste goes to a recycling center where products can be made from the trash. The energy used to make these products is a lot less than that of making new products from scratch. Energy consumption is minimized by 95% for things like aluminum cans. Since trash that does not biodegrade would now be made into new products instead of sitting in a hole with other trash rotting, the energy we saved can help make even more products. Just throwing plastic bottles in the correct bin has a huge positive impact, although you may not see it, it is there.
