Eric Truong

What is recycling?

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       It is the year 2035. Landfill sites are full and garbage incinerators are operating beyond their capacity. The streets are filthy with trash. Rats carrying disease skitter through the heaps of garbage that line the curbsides. In 2007, Christiane Dorion, the author of the book Earth’s Garbage Crisis, predicted the United States would be “choking on garbage by the year 2025. It is now 2018. What has been the impeding factor to this worldwide crisis? Recycling.

       People have been reusing all kinds of materials for thousands of years. Recycling dates back to cavemen who would collect discarded or broken tools made of flint and bone and use them to create new utensils. As recently as one hundred years ago, traveling peddlers in the United States and Europe collected rags, bones, and scrap metal waste from household garbage and sold them to manufacturers to make into new products. Recently however, during the early twentieth century, Americans began to rely less and less on recycling (Karasov). By the 1950s, the United States was labeled a "throw-away society" because America kept increasing the amount of goods that ended up in garbage landfills. Why is this important? Because this is the country we live in. Nowadays we are doing a much better job, despite our past ignorance, of conserving our resources and recycling reusable resources. In my research, I have found that recycling is a broad term that includes reusing as well. I have also learned why we should recycle and the many benefits.

       What exactly is recycling? You might think recycling is a long process of breaking down an item and reshaping it into another useful product. However, recycling is just any process that involves the recovery and reuse of materials that were once considered trash. Recycling can be as simple as reusing something—such as a jacket or computer—by passing it on for someone else to use. It is also the reprocessing of metals, plastics, paper, or glass to make new products.

       Recycling saves the environment and landfills from all of the garbage that we dispose. According to Earth’s Garbage Crisis, it is estimated that “humans produce approximately 29.4 billion tons of garbage a year.” The main problem with this is that we are now producing more trash than our natural environment can handle, and an increasing amount of this garbage is non-biodegradable. This means that a lot of this garbage cannot be decomposed or broken down naturally. Many of these materials will take thousands of years to break down, and some may never even fully break down. This buildup of this waste puts a lot of stress on the environment. Recycling can divert this garbage from build ups, such as landfills, in the environment. The United States Environmental Protection Agency states that “in 2013, Americans recycled and composted over 87 million tons of waste, which is comparable to removing the emissions from over 39 million passenger vehicles from the road in one year.” These numbers alone show how much garbage and pollution can be diverted from our landfills.

       So what can we do to prevent this? It is a combination of three ideas. To reduce, reuse, and recycle. The easiest way to prevent this garbage crisis is to reduce the trash we consume. Cut down on the use of plastic bags. Cut down on the use of styrofoam cups. By recycling, we are processing gathered waste and recovering the material to be reused again in a different form. If you want to dispose of your speech after reading it today, recycle it. It might end up being the paper you print out your finished thesis on in the future. By recycling our trash to be used in a different form, reusing materials so we can prevent excess waste, and reducing the amount of resources that we use, we can lower the amount of trash disposed to American landfills. After learning the great benefits of recycling, I advise you to not ask what recycling can do for you, but ask what you can do to recycle.