Why should Recycling be Mandatory?

Even though you may think this essay is trash. Please don’t throw it away. Recycle it instead. Did you know that Americans throw away enough aluminum every month to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet. Recycling has been around for many years but the people on the earth are not taking it seriously. The waste on the earth is piling up and keeps accumulating everyday which can be reduced by recycling. With people speaking out about recycling and how the earth is suffering from all the pollution and waste caused by humans there comes a question into mind, should recycling be mandatory? Those who argue that recycling should be mandatory focus on how it helps the earth while those against mandatory recycling focus on the idea that it could not be reinforced and how it actually can be a waste.

While some might say recycling wastes resources, recycling should be made mandatory because recycling helps the planet by saving expenses, helping preserve our natural resources, and recycling helps minimize pollution.

Recycling can help save our expenses and resources. Recycling helps by reducing the amount of materials that are wasted and thrown into landfills such as aluminum, glass, paper, and plastic. This allows companies to rely less on raw materials that require more energy to manufacture a new product. While landfill space can appear to be plentiful if a new landfill was made in your community you wouldn’t feel the same. Some people think that by burying trash it will just decompose in the dirt, some breakdown may happen but the lack of water, air, and light in a sealed landfill doesn’t let the trash to decompose fully. Brand new products are used everyday but all that is need to be done is put them in a pin and put them to the road which could make a lot of products to be used again.( By doing this the environment would be helped out and there would be a lot of money saved. If people do not want to recycle then they do not want to save the energy in the planet.

Figure 1: Global Plastic Production use since 1950-2015Saving energy is a big reason for recycling and s is preserving natural resources. When someone thinks of a forest the first thing they relate to it would be trees. Now a forest without trees is unthinkable but it’s becoming a reality. Nearly 4 billion trees are cut down a year for wood and paper products. Saving trees would be done by recycling paper products such as books and newspapers which would allow for more trees to be saved on the planet. From trees to minerals to marine resources recycling products is extremely important so natural resources can be saved. Natural resources are being depleted rapidly mainly caused by the increasing use of disposable products and packaging. 246 million tons of solid waste was generated by Americans in 2005 while there was only 56 million tons of materials being recycled.

Only 9% of the worlds plastic is recycled. Reprocessing used materials to make new products and packaging reduces the consumption of natural resources. By recycling five million tons of steel in 2005, Americans saved over six million tons of iron ore, 2.5 million tons of coal, and 62,500 tons of limestone. By recycling 42 million tons of newsprint, office paper and paperboard, Americans saved 714 million trees and 292,026 million gallons of water. Recycling often produces better products than those made of virgin materials; for instance, the tin in “”tin”” cans is more refined (thus more valuable) after being processed for recycling. If we continue to waste our resources, the time might come that they will all be used up and we will end up with nothing.

Along with saving resources recycling also helps the planet by minimizing pollution. When the stars are not visibly seen it’s because of pollution which, according to the World Health Organization, kills about 7 million people worldwide every year. By recycling and reusing garbage pollution can be minimized instead of burning garbage and throwing garbage in the ocean which is deadly to all living creatures. Every time there is a reduction of waste and recycling garbage the earth and millions of lives are saved just by reusing and recycling plastic bottles, disposable cups, and paper. Recycling can really help the environment and help people lessen the impact their garbage has on communities. Making recycling programs mandatory would really show how seriously people are taking the issue of environmentalism, conservation, and climate change. Jimmy Carter spoke about how waste and garbage reflects society.

[S]olid wastes are the discarded leftovers of our advanced consumer society. This growing mountain of garbage and trash represents not only an attitude of indifference toward valuable natural resources, but also a serious economic and public health problem.

By the increasing amount of waste that is in the world the attitude people have on natural resources is being shown as neglect. We all need to recycle just to keep the world round. The earth will not be here for long if we do not keep it up. We only have one world, once we lose it we cannot get it back. There are many ways one can start recycling plastic waste. We can start from reduce and reuse first. For reduce example: when we buy something, we should prepare our own bag to put the goods we buy, dispose the waste according to the bin that specially provided for plastic, use a refill bottle for our drink bottle, and prefer a paper bag than plastic bag.

These days, our earth has been filled by a lot of waste. There is a lot of garbage, plastic waste, and electronic waste. We always produce it and dump it when we need the new one. Our waste are piling up and continuously accumulating. Plastic waste is one of the biggest problems for us now. And our solution in this problem is recycling. Mandatory recycling is a way of helping the planet even though some people have strong feelings against it. There has been a push for recycling for a long time now and nobody is really paying much attention to it. Therefore, there is a need for recycling to be mandatory because as the world is right now with 60% to 80% of plastic waste on the sea coming from the land won’t keep the world healthy any longer. There are so many methods of recycling people can do such as having recycling bins available near them, looking for the recycled option in the products they buy, and buy recycling plastics and papers.

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