Why Recycle?
Recycling isn't a buzz word anymore. It's something that each and every one of us should be focusing on. Our population continues to grow, resources are dwindling and each of us is discarding more and more trash each year. As our landfills fill up, it's vitally important that we find new and more efficient ways of reusing the materials we throw away. We're not suggesting you have to convert your home to 100% solar energy and collect rainwater in buckets in order to make a difference, just do the little things and demonstrate to our children the importance of protecting our resources.
So why should we recycle our household goods? Consider:
- The average American produces more than 4 pounds of garbage a day.
- Recycling glass, instead of creating new bottles and jars, reduces mining waste by 70%, water use by 50%, and air pollution by 20%.
- Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months.
- Recycling one plastic bottle saves that bottle from filling our landfills for up to 1000 years, not to mention that we don't need to use more petroleum to create the bottle again.
- While glass is made of silica (sand), it can take up valuable space in a landfill and nearly 4000 years to break down.
- Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy it took to make the can in the first place.
There are any number of reasons why recycling household items is important, but whatever the reason it doesn't take much to make a difference. If we all take small, simple steps they'll grow exponentially.
