We know recycling without a doubt helps make our world a better and cleaner place, but what are some reasons why you should recycle?
Recycling Reduces Pollution
Pollution is the presence in or introduction into the environment of a substance or thing that has harmful or poisonous effects. These effects can cause damage to crops and trees, marine wildlife, and other living things on earth. By recycling, we use recycled materials to replace new raw materials during the manufacturing process. This way we avoid environmental damage caused by harvesting trees, mining for metals, etc. Producing paper from recycled materials instead of raw materials will cut air pollution down by 74% and water pollution down by 35%. Using recycled cans to make more aluminum cans reduces air pollution by a whopping 95% and water pollution by 97%. These efforts of recycling are over 190 times more effective in reducing green-house gases compared to landfills and manufacturing from raw materials.
Recycling Conserves Energy
Processing raw materials to make materials such as paper, plastic, and metal uses up a lot of energy. Luckily, recycled materials require much less energy to process into those usable materials. Recycling essentially eliminated the need to make usable materials from scratch. Before recycling, if manufacturers wanted to make paper, they would’ve had to cut down trees and make paper from that source, but now with better resources and recycling we can save energy and produce paper from previously recycled paper! This goes for many other products like aluminum and plastic. Manufacturers use 30% less energy when using this process.
Recycling is Good for the Economy
Recycling creates jobs. If you think about it, there are a bunch of jobs created by just a few people beginning to recycle. Someone needs to pick up those recyclables, they need to be brought to processing facilities, and then they need to be sorted and prepared for manufacturing. After that, those materials end up at manufacturing facilities and are made (by people) into new products. Believe it or not, 86% of the total jobs in the U.S. come from recycling activities. This percentage is based on ⅓ of our discards being recycled. With improvements on recycling in the future, jobs will only increase!
Isn’t recycling awesome? You should try it!