World Wide Recycling | Teen Ink

World Wide Recycling

May 15, 2008
By Anonymous

World Wide Recycling

What do you recycle? At my house we recycle almost everything. We recycle cardboard, cans, newspaper, paper bags, and plastic bags. A lot of Americans today don’t recycle even if they should. I don’t understand why they don’t start recycling, even after all of the facts that have came out about the o-zone layer and pollution and how we are running out of our resources. If people really understood what was going to happen, I still don’t think that they would recycle. So I ask you, do you recycle?

It’s clear that there are a lot of people who are aware of the effects that recycling has on the Earth, but they still choose not to care. Most people in America get the newspaper everyday and many of them just throw it away when they are done reading it. Did you know that it is like throwing away 500,000 trees everyday?

Most everybody that doesn’t recycle has an excuse. Like one person’s excuse would be that it takes too much effort to go collect and sort out all of their trash. Well that’s just the lazy way out and I think that if you set up separate boxes for different recyclables then it would be easy. Did you know that it is a proven fact from “http://members.aol.com/ramola15/funfacts.html” that the average person throws away 1,609 pounds of trash every year? Also that the U.S. is the number one country for producing trash. That is terrible!

Another excuse that people have is that they don’t think that what they do on an average day impacts the earth. But really it does and I don’t think that there is any way possible that you couldn’t impact the Earth on a daily basis. If you have a car or any machine that runs on gas, then you are affecting the world every time you use that. A lot of people just don’t take the time to think about what they are doing. If everybody recycled one plastic bottle every day, the Earth would be such a better place.

So all of you people that say there is no need to recycle and that we are fine the way we are, need to think again. It’s not that hard to figure out that we are headed downhill fast. If people aren't going to be responsible enough, then I think that we need to make a law that says that everybody has to recycle.



If we recycled our paper that we use at school it could save 380 gallons of oil per ton of paper. Says “http://members.aol.com/ramola15/funfacts.html.” That is a lot of oil and with the price of oil today, I think that we would want to save as much as we could. I mean think about it! How hard is it to put your old papers into a recycling bin, it’s not that difficult to do. The school that I’m at recycles everything. We recycle paper, cardboard, and bottles. I think that if everybody took the initiative that our world would be a better place.


Also every year we make enough film for cooking to shrink wrap Texas! That is a ton of plastic that is used. I mean my mom bakes all the time and uses shrink wrap; I would have never thought that that could have such an affect on the Earth. Also, did you know that Americans throw away enough glass bottles every week to fill the former WTC’s towers? That is terrible because glass can be recycled forever.

Think about it like this, if we don’t start recycling paper then the trees that produce our oxygen are going to start to go extinct. We eventually aren't going to have any oxygen. I’m glad that you read my essay and I hope that some of the things that I have said sunk in. Recycling is a really big deal that needs to be dealt with on a worldwide basis. So next time you go out to throw something away, think about if it can be recycled or not.


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