Recycling has been a very controversial topic more and more these days. In China they have built a large recycling complex that is helping forests worldwide from disaster by having a strong world market for more wastepaper instead of pulpwood. Also West Fargo has just started to allow the city to let the garbage men pick up recycling. Lastly how more and more people in big cities like Brooklyn are asking themselves why we didn’t take recycling more seriously back before global warming was a problem. This controversy could be solved if we fix a few of these problems and take recycling more seriously.
In China they have built a very large recycling building for wastepaper as an alternative to pulpwood. In the US, Japan, and Europe China has prevented 65 million tons of wastepaper from heading to landfills. Only last year China’s use of wastepaper saved about 54 million metric tons of wood from being taken to make pulp. At the same time, China gets an advantage, because they normally get first dibs at getting the glossy paper. In 2006, the US alone sold 8.6 million metric tons of wastepaper to China. In conclusion we should keep selling our paper to China to help reduce the number of trees being cut down.
Also we have just started to have garbage men/women collect the blue recycling boxes and recycle them for you. You can recycle just about everything except for plastic bags. The bins are made of lightweight plastic and have wheels for mobility. Once collected, the recyclables will be transferred from the West Fargo Transfer Station to the Twin Cities Materials Recovery Facility in Minneapolis. Lastly you can recycle just about everything; you can recycle tin, aluminum, cardboard, paper, newspaper, magazines, glass and plastic, one of the only things that you can’t recycle is plastic bags.
In higher population cities they are asking themselves if they should have taken recycling more seriously earlier. In Brooklyn, they have a large recycling deposit where all the recycling goes; they are asking themselves though is all of this worth it? Recycling is worth it when we are talking about metals, a can can be recycled forever with no loss of quality and recycling this can use less than 5 percent of the energy that it takes to refine bauxite ore into fresh aluminum. Whereas plastics and paper don’t do so well after being recycled a few times they degrade, but it is still good to recycle them. Suggested by the EPA that taking 38 million cars off the road recycling would be how much we could have because that is how much greenhouse gas was taken out of the air, all by recycling.
In final conclusion, recycling is doing a lot of good not only in the U.S. but it foreign countries as well. Also we should keep doing this so we can reduce the amount of pollution and also the greenhouse gasses in the air. So we should keep going with the China plant and also with it in West Fargo, plus we should try our best in ever the higher population cities to recycle. Like I said before we can do so much if you just take the time to instead of throwing your cans and such in the trash take the time to put it in the recycling. Therefore we don’t even have to think about greenhouse gases or pollution.
What would have happened if we did not recycle?
What is the bottle bill?
What is a plastic water bottle recycled into?