Is It Worth the Hassle to Recycle?

Everywhere you go you hear people talking about how we must recycle everything in order to take care of the environment. But is it truly worth the effort? Do you know that it takes more or less 1,000 years for a plastic shopping bag to entirely break down? Bear in mind, you’re simply talking about a single plastic bag so that’s a long time. Compute the number of trash bags you use annually on top of those plastic shopping bags. When you multiply that number by the number of people living in our country, it’s a huge number. A good idea would be to recycle the shopping bag instead of letting it sit in the landfill slowly rotting. A lot of things can be recycled such as shopping bags being used to make clothing and old tires being used in constructing children’s playgrounds. Just about anything can be reused.

Fifteen years ago, the town of Lemoore, California instituted a really stringent recycling program. If Lemoore residents did not adopt the recycling rules, they had to pay fines. Most people opted to follow and the town profited immensely from recycling. They were able to build a new playground as well as build a water park. They were able to fund other municipal necessities such as a police department and pre-school scholarships via their recycling. Thus, you can tell that recycling can generate money for other things as well as reduce the amount of scrap going to the landfill.

While it may seem that the recycling efforts of one person can’t make a difference, multiply that small difference by everyone in the world and the results could be remarkable. We would not need such huge landfills, which would save operating costs and preserve the terrain. In addition, recycling can help to generate money for needy residential areas while benefiting the earth. Everyone benefits.

Even if you don’t care about the earth, you should at least think of others; not just humans but also animals. Global warming and other environmental problems are killing wildlife and also destroying the planet. Taking even minute amounts of time to recycle can help to make the earth a great place for later generations.

Consider how long every last thing you discard takes to decay. As mentioned earlier, a plastic bag will take more or less 1,000 years to decay. An expendable diaper will take more or less 400 years, a milk bottle could take 500 years, a glass jar could take a great one million years and Styrofoam (that stuff your takeout foods are in) may possibly never decay! This can all be recycled, so why simply toss them?

Evidently, there are some things we can’t recycle at the moment, but with the technology becoming even more advanced we might find new ways of recycling and new uses of several materials. Right now, there’s definitely no reason we aren’t able to recycle plastics, metals, and glass. Recycling these items is fairly convenient in most communities and is not costly, so it’s a good idea to help our planet. If everybody helped, a great deal of good would be done.