What's the point of recycling?

Question

What's the point of recycling?

Answer 1

We produce over 15,000 tons of rubbish everyday. It is only a matter of time before we run out of space to dispose of them. Recycling reduces waste, which in turn reduces the need for landfills and dumpsites.

Recycling reduces pollution and saves energy. Making

products from virgin or raw materials results in pollution

and uses more energy.

Recycling is cheaper in the long run compared to maintaining landfills and other systems. When recycling programmes

become more efficient, there will be less rubbish to dispose of.

Recycling creates up to 5 times more jobs than waste disposal alone. It will create jobs for engineers, machine specialists, environmental personnel, general workers and many more.

Recycling improves cleanliness and quality of life.

Recycling:

§         reduces the demand on our natural resources,

§         saves valuable landfill space, and

§         creates opportunities for new industries.



If we don’t recycle, we will eventually run out of space for all of our trash.  What will we do with it then?

First of all, recycling saves taxpayers and the towns they live in lots of money. It costs far less to have recyclable items hauled away than trash.

Americans throw away the equivalent of more that 30 million trees in newsprint each year.

If you recycled the New York Times every day for a year, you would prevent 15 pounds of air pollution caused by virgin paper production. If all the buyers and subscribers of that paper recycled it, over 6,000 tons of pollution would be kept out of the air we breathe.

A ton of paper made from 100 percent-recycled paper, instead of virgin paper pulp saves:

17 trees

7,000 gallons of water

60 pounds air pollution

4,100 kilowatt hours of energy

3 cubic yards of landfill space

taxpayer dollars used for disposal costs

Cardboard

Recycling cardboard cuts the emission of sulfur dioxide (part of acid rain) in half.

The following materials are required to make just one ton of paper packaging:

3,688 pounds of wood

2167 pounds of lime

360 pounds of salt cake

76 pounds of soda ash

24,000 gallons of water

28 million BTUs of energy

At Christmas time, for example, Americans throw away over 4 million tons of paper packaging!

Aluminum Cans

In terms of energy, throwing away one aluminum can is like dumping 2 gallons of gasoline on the ground.

The aluminum can industry can make up to 20 times more cans for the same amount of energy if they use recycled cans rather than raw materials like bauxite ore.

It takes only 90 days to get a "new" recycled aluminum can back on the grocery shelf after it is collected, melted, rolled, manufactured, and distributed to beverage makers.

Enough aluminum cans are thrown away each to year to rebuild the nation's entire commercial airline fleet

Answer 2

land fills are filling fast so we need to recycle to cut it down

Answer 3

Generally, it cost less to use recycled resources as opposed to generating new items from natural resources.  Aluminum and steel are great examples -  mining for Al and Fe for new ore is more expensive than recycling.

Answer 4

When someone asks "What is the Point of...?" what does it mean?

It can mean that they are unhappy with doing something.   They want to think it is a waste of their time, but are asking for one last chance at persuading them why it might be good or useful for them.

The trouble with recycling is that there are a lot of people whose lives are too joyless or selfish to be able to spare the time and energy to even separate their own rubbish.

To date when it comes to deciding whether Recycling is Good or Bad, we have depended too heavily on persuading people to use their own sense of Good or Bad,

But sometimes, even when they decide that Recycling is Good, they don't want to do it, because there isn't anything in it for them as an individual.

This is an example of the problem with living in a free and liberal society don't you think?  Compare it with driving on  tne same side of the road as everyone(the left side in the UK and Japan, the right side in the USA or Europe).   We do it because it is a decided convention that is Good for the Group.   The Individual who does not go along with the Group will get arrested, or end up causing a nasty car accident.

We cannot any longer have the freedom of WASTING.  It is not a terrible loss of freedom, so if it makes an individual want to rebel against it, he/she probably should be figuring out which better freedoms they are missing out on which they could be enjoying.

(When laws were first created to force people to drive on only one side of the road, the people who already had cars thought at first they were losing a lot of freedom!)

Answer 5

All of the other answers you have received are fundamentally correct but there are other things that are important.  Without recycling many of the products we take for granted would only be available to those who are rich.  

To give several examples:  Aluminium is expensive to extract from ore but is relatively inexpensive to reprocess;  aluminum foil or pots would not be practical otherwise.  

Iron ore needs to be primed with processed iron in the furnace to be economically useful; old cars anyone?  

Plastics of many types are recycled to produce all of those things like watering cans and place mats and so on that we take for granted that would be too expensive otherwise.  

You can look into this aspect in any decent Encyclopedia or on- line somewhere like Wikapedia.

Now the other aspect of recycling,  the intact side ...

like we do here.

There are many items that are surplus to ones needs, that even though still useful, will wind up in a landfill.  Reusit stores take some, yard-sales take more, charity even; but when its some thing they don't want somewhere else then a site like this is available.  

Here also when you need a particular item then you can ask.    

Fuel, time, materials; it's all recycling.  

Hope this helps.

Answer 6

Most of that stuff that gets sorted and taken away by the municipal trash company ostensibly to be recycled, goes no farther than the local landfill anyway. There aren't enough companies that are able to make a profit by recycling materiels. The technology is there. It just costs too much.

In the end we have nicely organized rubbish at the landfill. Go someday and see for yourself.

Answer 7

the point of recycling is protecting the earth which means that if  we didnt recycle earth would be a huge dump.also,without recycling there would be almost no trees earth could be like the globi desert.so the point of recycling  is helping the earth.

Answer 8

Wasting time and raising costs.  Possibly someone might convince you it will make you feel better.

Answer 9

It helps the o zone. People an use more for less.