Dustin McKinney
Research Paper
English 190
4/11/13
Recycling for Sure
Recycling may be time consuming and does require planning and effort, it is needed because it helps save our natural resources, it also protects our health and environment, and it benefits both consumers and manufacturers. One of the most obvious reasons we should all recycle is because of all of the garbage we dump in landfills.
In the United States use of landfills was at its highest in the 1980s when we threw nearly 150 million tons of trash each year into landfills. Eleanor Hall wrote in her book "Garbage," even today, we throw away more than 100 million tons of garbage every year”. This means in time we will not have a lot of places that have enough space for landfills. So having landfills is not a very good solution for garbage disposal. In the U.S. recycling efforts could help turn away more than 60 million tons of waste away from landfills yearly. This could add up to about 32 percent of all of our garbage in America each year. To help even more besides just recycling, but also buying recycled products whenever possible could help eliminate the amount of items going into the landfill. In categories such as motor oil, paper towels, trash bags and aluminum cans are only that of 5,000 other recyclable products out there for purchase. All recycled items are materials from things we were going to toss or rebuilt from other used products.

Recycling efforts are not high and need to be a lot better because of landfills. Landfill trash sticks around for a very long time. The reason landfills stick around so long is because they are designed to bury trash, not break it down. So knowing trash doesn’t break down and a landfill closes down that site and its ground water has to be monitored up to 30 years later. Since we have to watch the landfill that is costing us more money to watch landfills after closing and if not watches closely it could cause problems in underground water ways.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has listed many reason why recycling is so important. There are many good reasons to recycle, but five reasons I found to be very important. First reason would be for us to recycle is it saves us energy. Since the manufacturer doesn’t have to produce something new from raw natural resources we can use recycled materials and save on energy consumptions, which will in fact lower production costs. Reason number two is that it will reduce landfills. The more we recycle the less need for landfills and the cost to have them and less reason for the chance of you having to live next to one. Reason number three is that it helps protect and preserves our wildlife. This would help protect destroying habits for animals and not endangering them by taking away homes and forcing them into unknown environments. Also recycling paper you are also saving millions of trees each day. Reason number four is that it is good for are economy. By having people recycle and recycled materials being purchased it has created a greater demand for more recycled goods. It’s also means that recycled good use less water which creates less pollution and uses less energy. And finally it helps reduce our climate problems we are facing today. When we recycle we are using less carbon each and every day and also reduce the amount of unhealthy greenhouse gas emissions.

A lot of people don’t realize how long it actually takes for some of these things to decompose such as aluminum cans. Aluminum cans take up to 500 years to decompose and if they are sitting in a landfill they are going to be sitting there for a long time. Aluminum cans are only one of the several hundred items that sit in the landfill that stay for a long time which could be reused over and over again. Last year from EPA estimates 48 percent of 3.41 million tons of aluminum can were recycled instead of being tossed into the landfill, which there still about 1.77 million cans are still going in