Why is recycling important?

1. Why is recycling important? During your lifetime, you'll produce over 600 times your own weight in the trash—enough to fill a few trucks. That staggering statistic might not be such a problem if we didn't have to live on a relatively small, overcrowded planet. Pretty much all the resources we have on Earth—all the raw materials and an awful lot of the energy—are limited: once we've used them up, we won't get any more. So it makes sense to use things as wisely as we can. The best way to use Earth's resources more sensibly is to reduce the number of things that we use (for example, less packaging on food in shops) and reuse items instead of throwing them away (reusing carrier bags grocery store makes a lot of sense). If we can't reduce or reuse and throw things away, recycling them is far better than simply tossing them out in the trash. Let's take a closer look at recycling and how it works! When you throw stuff away, you might be happy to get rid of it: into the trash it goes, never to be seen again! Unfortunately, that's not the end of the story. The things we throw away have to go ​somewhere​—usually, they go off to be bulldozed underground in a landfill or burnt in an incinerator. ​Junk removal ​services are not effective at places and there are chances that dumps are horribly polluting. They look awful, they stink, they take up space that could be used for better things, and they sometimes create toxic soil and water pollution that can kill fish in our rivers and seas. One of the worst things about landfills is that they're wasting a massive amount of potentially useful material. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of resources to make things, and when we throw those things in a landfill, at the end of their lives, we're also saying goodbye to all the energy and resources they contain. Some authorities like to burn their trash in giant incinerators instead of burying it in landfills. That certainly has advantages: it reduces the amount of waste that has to be buried and generates useful energy. But it can also produce toxic air pollution, and burning almost anything (except plants that have grown very recently) adds to global warming and climate change. The trouble is, we're all in the habit of throwing stuff away. In the early part of the 20th century, people used materials much more wisely—especially in World War II (1939–1945), when many raw

2. materials were in short supply. But in recent decades, we've become a very disposable society. We tend to buy new things instead of getting old ones repaired. Many men use disposable razors, for example, instead of purchasing reusable ones, while a lot of women wear disposable nylon stockings. Partly this is to do with the sheer convenience of throwaway items. It's also because they're cheap: artificial plastics, made from petroleum-based materials, became extraordinarily inexpensive and widely available after World War II. But that wasteful period in our history is coming to an end. We're finally starting to realize that our live-now, pay-later lifestyle is storing up problems for future generations. Earth is soon going to be running on empty if we carry on as we are. Americans live in much greater affluence than virtually anyone else on Earth. What happens when people in developing countries such as India and China decide to live the same way as us? According to environmentalist's Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins, we'd need two piles of Earth to satisfy all their needs. If everyone on Earth doubles their standard of living in the next 40 years, we'll need 12 Earths to meet them!