Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
A secret demon
Opinion: Is it always better to recycle?
I was talking to a friend recently and she told me that in some cases it's better to throw rubbish directly in the bin rather than to recycle it! I found this astonishing, so I immediately decided to find out if it was true. Could it be that all these pro-recycling advertisements, telling us to recycle and making us feel guilty, were actually wrong in their assertations that recycling is the way to go? I decided to investigate.
Some sources say that when you recycle bottles it takes more fuel to transport the bottles to the recycling plants and to process them than to make an entirely new bottle! So should we recycle? Although it isn't the best option, it is better when you consider waste management and the jobs created. Recycling creates ten times as many jobs as land filling.
But what about paper I hear you ask! Paper takes up the largest portion of waste. Each American uses approximately one 100-foot-tall Douglas fir tree in paper and wood products per year. The statistics are bound to be similar in Ireland! Also, it takes 24 trees to make 1 ton of newspaper. Again in the US, the production of each week’s Sunday newspapers means that 500,000 trees must be cut down. We are not as large a country as the US, but we too must cut down a large number of trees for our Sunday newspapers. Only 6% of a tree is used to produce 500 sheets of paper, so what do you do with all our newspapers and writing paper once done?! Overall, it is better to put it in a recycling bin than in normal disposal. Why?
Because:
- Recycling paper instead of making it from new material generates 74% less air pollution and uses 50% less water. (EPA, 2008)
- Producing recycled paper requires about 60 percent of the energy used to make paper from virgin wood pulp. (EPA, 2008)
- Recycling 1 ton of paper saves 17 mature trees, 7,000 gallons of water, 3 cubic yards of landfill space, 2 barrels of oil, and 4,100 kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough energy to power the average home for five months. (EPA, 2008)
- Recycled paper produces 73% less air pollution than if it was made from raw materials. For every ton of recycled newspaper, we save 17 trees.
- Reusing a grocery bag for a shopping trip, can save about 60,000 trees.
Yes. there were some problems in the past with the recycling of paper. The minerals used at the recycling plant sometimes leeked out and into the near-by vegetation, killing more trees then they were saving (Engineers Ireland)! Hopefully this does not take place anymore and the extra effort you make to recycle will prove beneficial to our world.
What you have to understand is that recycling, although good, is not the best option! The best way is prevention - don't use or buy things that cause harm to the environment and are hard to dispose of such as aerosols. The next step is minimisation; buy or use less paper - write smaller, etc! The third and finest step is to reuse; for example, use your water bottles again and again. Finally the fourth option is to recycle! The fourth!
So make sure to do your best to act out the first three ways before even thinking about recycling. The final two ways are energy recovery and normal disposal.
The question you have to ask people the world over is: How much do you care?
By: Laura Keogh
