Recycling Essay, Research Paper

Today I chose to try to persuade everybody into helping every body in this world now and for generations ahead, it sounds like a pretty big task but really its very simple. All you need to do is recycle. Recycling is a very needed thing in order to keep this planet from turning into a trash dump.

Between 1960 and 1986 the amount of American trash has grown 80% from 87.5mill tons to 157 tons per year, not including the 90 million tons created by industry every year. In 1988 over 70% of the landfills were closed, the US government then had to figure out how we were going to deal with this huge amount of trash each year. The 4 main solutions they came up with were opening more landfills, incineration, shipping out of the country, and oh yeah Recycling. Three out of these four were very bad, both ecologically and ethically. But the fourth one on the other hand was very good, it reduced energy use to make knew products, saved the wilderness by not dumping trash on it, and best of all created basically new products without almost any waist.

Lots of people believe that it is not worth their time to recycle or that whatever they do is insignificant, but that’s wrong it really takes no longer to throw a can in the recycling bin than in the garbage. Anything that anybody recycles makes a difference, for instance one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a T.V for 3 hours, a single glass jar saves enough energy to light a light bulb for 4 hours. So for every thing you recycle it does save energy.

One of the big myths which I think prevents a lot of people from recycling is that not many things can be recycled, maybe that was true 15 years ago but not any more. Now days almost anything can be recycled, to a certain extend. Since we also live in a city which suposively has one of the best recycling systems in the nation, we have no excuse not to recycle; the recycling center will take anything from fabric to cars.

I think that everybody should have great respect for the planet that we live on, therefore everybody should do every thing possible to keep this planet in as good of shape as we can for our own generation and generations ahead. So for all of you who do not already recycle and would like to see their future generations live in a clean and sanitary world not covered in landfills and waste, I suggest you start recycling and getting other people recycling to.