Recycling: Good Habits over Mindless Hazards

Image by Desmond Talkington via Flickr

Heather Wilkins | Contributing Writer

opinion@fiusm.com


 

Everyone says it is good to recycle. We always have heard the three R’s of helping the environment: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle thanks to conservation programs and television shows like “Captain Planet.” But when you take a look into what goes on after sorting plastics from paper, glass from metals, you may get an uglier picture about what goes on in the factories that make recycled products that we can buy for fewer than five dollars at a local store.

I’m not saying recycling is bad. I say it is a great habit to get into and have a notion of doing something good on your behalf. But it is the factories and processing plants that use fossil fuels to make recycled plastic bottles filled with drinking water or recycled glass bottles filled with organic teas and juices. We may have this mindless consciousness of not knowing what truly goes on in the landfills that makes us understand that what we think is right, may seem wrong and profitable to those to play on our cognitive dissonance.

However, when people throw away food, there is a positive side to recycling. Scraps of chucked food are often fed to pigs on small subsidy farms where they lap it up like it is the best thing on the planet. Even if you want to do your part for the environment, the least you can do is think of the unused foods from your annual disposal of garbage going towards fattening pigs for bacon season.

In fact, recycling reduces the amount of waste that makes its way to the oceans where sea turtles choke on plastic bags of Lays and Doritos because it looks like some tasty morsel of jellyfish. So the next time you see someone littering their empty cans and bags into the ocean, knock them out silly for wanting to keep Crush the sea turtle living past 150-years-old. Recycling also helps reduce the amount of waste that piles up in landfills that originally are meant for disposable materials like food, paper and other organic matters. Old tires or non-reusable tires like scraps of rubber from blow outs, are being recycled, given new treads and then shipped off to tire manufacturers to be logoed with brands like Goodyear or Michelin.

It’s the problems of littering and dissonance that we need to focus on when it comes to our part in recycling. So whenever you see someone pass a trash can and throw their crumpled potato chip bags, styrofoam boxes dripping with leftover mystery sauce and the occasional flying trash on the highway, say something. No one bothers to think that maybe we are going to kill top predators and cute little creatures because what we throw from our windows shouldn’t concern us with contributing important nutrients back into the environment. Each time you see people throw away garbage and treat anything recyclable like normal trash, just think back to those fifth-grade biodegradable experiments and think about what you can try to do to give back to Mother Nature.

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