Matt Bell (FGCU): The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Recycling

Before transfering to FGCU, recycling and sustainability was not a very important topic to me. In my first year here at FGCU, i was required to take a Colloquium class, although boring, that helped open my eyes to the importance of recycling and sustainability. According to Sustainablog.org, we have over 251 million tons of trash here in the U.S.. Out of the 251 million pound of trash that we have here, we have only managed to recycle approximatley 82 million tons of materials. That leaves somewhere around 169 million tons of materials that we have deprived our earth of and not payed it forward in the form of reducing, reusing, and recycling. If you look at it percentage wise, here in America we are recycling approximatley 32% of the total waste. Although this is up 100% from the past couple decades, we still need to keep on the right track towards sustainability. One thing that we could do to help is start the transition from plastic bottles for bottled water to some other type of material. Every year 1.5 tons of plastic is used to bottles 89 billion liters of water of which only 20% of those bottles get recycled. When it comes to paper, we are spending millions of dollars for space in landfills. Just recycling your junk mail every day would make a huge impact on saved money. Each year the average U.S. citizen will recieve about 1.5 trees worth of junk mail. Recycling all of the junk mail would save us approximatley $370 million in landfill dumping fees each year. Each year, 10 million tons of newspaper are thrown into landfills. If we were to recycle just half of the newspapers that we were throwing away we would be saving somwhere around 75 million trees.

So as you can see we are a part of a generation that is on the brink of destruction if we dont change our lifestyles when it comes to sustainability. We are using up all of the critical materials of earth at a rate that our planet can not keep up with. I mean if you can get many uses out one onject by simply throwing it into a different bin than all  of our other trash, why not do it? Its simple and its a step that we need to take if we want our children and grandchildren to enjoy the same beautiful planet that we are living on today.

This entry was posted on 14. April 2009 at 21:13 and is filed under Social Problems, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.