HESITATIONS IN RECYCLING
I for one am a recycling enthusiast. Whenever I do my shopping, I carry with me a cloth bag or two where I put all my groceries. This saves the store from needing to provide plastic or paper bags to their customers, in turn saving energy and resources for the production of paper and plastic bags. When everyone does this, we lessen the amount of waste we take to landfills, and the potential of pollution. Also, whenever possible, I purchase stuff that is made from recycled materials or from companies that practice recycling.
Recycling has long been well-liked for the most part by businesses and local communities, but it is a fact that there are still people who have some reservations about recycling. It does take education, effort and discipline. Yet, with the availability of information about recycling and the increasing urgency for each of us to participate, why are there still people who refuse to do so?
- Recycling can be costly. Often conflicts arise disputing who will pay for the recycling - the city or the residents. There are also states that have ‘pay as you throw' policies, and if you don't like recycling and segregating and end up with a lot of trash, you're bound to pay fees. Also, just about anything could be recycled provided that we have facilities for the complex collection, sorting and processing of these materials. However, this would certainly cost money. One example is polystyrene. Because of its bulk and weight, it may be very expensive to bring this to recycling stations, so several cities don't include this in recycling.
- The type of material that is recycled by stations depends on what city you live in. Most recycling stations reprocess the most essential items or those that make up most of the waste stream, which include cardboard, steel, glass, or newspaper. However, some cities recycle up to 35 different items and others may accept only five. This now causes some people to be hesitant with the idea of recycling. True enough, I have a neighbor who was fuming mad when she tried to turn over a trash pile of Styrofoam and the collector did not accept the items for the simple reason that they do not recycle such stuff.
- Recycling is time-consuming. For instance, newspapers need to be uncontaminated after collection and compressed before being carried over to a big paper recycling company, which can take too much time for some people to bother.
- Recycling can be confusing to some. Which waste do you throw in the blue bin? There's the black and the green bin too! Neighborhoods may also differ in waste pick-up schedules.
Americans need to be educated more about the importance of recycling and how to go about it in their own homes. We don't realize just how much stuff we can recycle in our household.
Whichever way you put it, I still find recycling an integral part in saving the environment. For one, most local governments and even manufacturers offer free recycling. It will take up your time and energy, but in the long run, we would be able to save a number of landfills from being created, thus giving more space for people to farm, live and work. Plus, putting our garbage in landfills would have an average cost of $50 per ton of waste, which is no joke at all. Recycling recovers important materials and conserves our dwindling resources. This way, there would be much more raw sources for use by future generations. Recycling also saves energy and lessens pollution. This helps in lessening the effects of global warming, ozone depletion and other ecological issues that we are confronted with.