The Importance of Recycling

Why should we recycle?
There are millions of tons of garbage in landfills throughout the US. Trash is thrown away in one big huge pile and left to biodegrade. All these items that we consider trash are items that can be re-used thus eliminating the need to make new containers and such.

Think about how much plastic that is thrown into garbage cans. Plastic can be recycled and re-used over and over again. It does our society no good to waste this material because we use it every day, think about it!

Aluminum cans are also thrown into the trash when this material can also be recycled and re-used. Glass can be re-used and melted to make various items. Metal can be re-used for an array of products from cars to buildings. Left over food can be put into a compost bin to later be used to put into the soil as an organic fertilizer. Most trash is not trash at all, its materials that can be re-used and we label this "waste" and that is exactly what we are doing to the materials.

How long can American's pile up their trash before it begins to have a serious effect on our environment? The gases that trash produce can be used as energy and we do not take advantage of this, it is just wasted into the atmosphere.

What can you do?
Try to recycle as much as you can, some places such as Iowa, Hawaii, California, and other U.S. cities offer 5-10 cent refunds on cans, bottles, and plastics.

To find local recycling centers visit: http://earth911.org/ there is also information on this website about how and where to recycle your Christmas tree.

What can we do?
Call your local political figures and ask them to make recycling easier. Installing recycling bins rather than trash cans would reduce the amount of trash throughout a city and help with recycling efforts. The more accessible it is to recycle the more people will participate.

Some quick facts:

*An ink cartridge takes 1000 years to bio-degrade

(Information provided by http://www.cartridgecityfranchising.co.uk/index.php?id=29)

*Pollution wastes energy and makes air quality poor

*An aluminum can be recycled and as soon as 6 weeks be part of a can

*Aluminum can be re-cycled over and over again

* If Americans recycled a small portion of their newspaper some 25 million trees could be saved annually.

*Americans used 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour and a large portion are just thrown into a garbage bin.

*A glass bottle can take as long as 4,000 years to decompose.

*A typical baby uses 10,000 diapers in their early life, using a cloth diaper cost 19 cents less than a disposable diaper. Each year 16 trillion diaper end up in landfills.

All these examples except the first one were taken off the website http://members.aol.com/ramola15/funfacts.html where you can also find out many more astonishing facts about not recycling and the effects it has on our environment.