Monday, January 20, 2014
Free post # 1: Recycling
This week I want to talk about recycling. Recycling is a big environmental issue. We have been discussing its impacts in my ESA 200 class. We as americans throw away so many items that should be recycled. Instead we don't take the time and just throw them in the garbage, this creates so much waste that we put into our ground, that should be reusable!Last week we got to do something that really showed the impacts of recycling, and how much we waste. My class met at MSU's recycling center, and did a trash short. We took a dumpster from Bailey hall, and dumped its contents out from the pervious day. We then sorted through everything pulling out papers,plastic, glass, metals, and landfill products. We assumed there would not be to much that should have been recycled because Bailey Hall is home to the RISE program students. These are students who are all for recycling and trying to get to a zero waste baseline for recycling and trash. It was very eye opening experience, almost 40% of what was deemed as landfill was actually recyclable. That is a big amount and should not be that high. Also it was surprising to me how many things should have been recyclable, but could not be because they were contaminated because of food waste. This is something I was unaware of before this experience. So take a yogurt container for example, its plastic and should be recycled, although if it is not properly rinsed out, the food waste left in it makes is no longer a recyclable product. We need to work harder to recycle, and stop wasting.
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Before seeing this post, I thought recycling was simply just distinguish plastic, paper and trash. And only that plastic and paper should be counted as reusable resources. However, I did not notice that the things I counted as trash like the yogurt container may still exist potential recycling value. I will pay attention in the future and thanks the blogger for sharing your experience and telling us we can do better.
ReplyDelete(By the way, my little suggestion would be adding a picture of the 40% recyclable "landfill" you saw at that time, because it helps to convey a more intuitive feeling.)
I think this is quite shocking because it is something our society has been aware of for a long time, I would have thought that things would have changed. Even with all of the 'Go Green' campaigns on campus, nothing seems to be changing. But even I throw away a ton of stuff as well because I don't realize that it can be recycled. What do you think could be done to spread even more awareness of the less obvious things that could be recycled in order to stop of all the unnecessary waste?
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