Recycling It's Time to Clean Up
Uploaded by Quest4Glory on Feb 02, 2005
It’s Time to Clean Up
What’s the deal with recycling? It is such an important environmental issue, and yet it seems as though there isn’t much done about it as a community. If you ask a random person on the street what they think about recycling, nine times out of ten they’ll smirk and tell you “It’s good for the environment.” But, really, they don’t understand the significance of recycling. Although the concept of recycling and reusing is preached in the schools, on the television set, and on billboards, people don’t take it seriously enough. Recycling is plainly returning an item back to its original condition so that it can be reused. As astonishing as it may seem, the average San Diego citizen disposes of 4.6 pounds of waste per day, which would equate to more than a thousand six hundred pounds per year. Surprising, half of this outlandish total of waste dump could easily be recycled. Recycling is so important to the welfare of our community that California passed a law that required all of its counties and cities to cut the amount of waste going to their landfills in half. Most people already know that recycling helps conserve natural resources, and San Diegan’s of course know that recycling saves space in our landfills. On the other hand, few know that recycling waste products conserves water, energy, trees, and helps reduce pollution in our drinking water and air.
With the recent budget deficits in California, energy must be conserved to save money. Conserving energy by way of recycling is a crucial environmental benefit. It takes far less energy to make new products and put them into working order using recycled waste than it does to make them from entirely new materials. Every pound of steel that you recycle will save enough energy to light a 60-watt bulb for more than a day! A recycled pound of plastic will keep the same bulb aglow for 48 hours straight. Even that empty Sprite bottle that you so thoughtlessly recycled will store more than enough energy to keep your television set running for hours on end. San Diego will benefit greatly from the extra energy they will save just by putting their recyclables in the big blue bin. For example, the citizens of Pennsylvania came together as a community and made a valiant effort at improving the amount of waste they recycle. They in...