Research Paper:
Should Recycle be mandatory?

February 15, 2011

Should recycling be mandatory?
Is recycling really going green with the environment? Or is recycling just a way to go for green material known as dollars? Recycling is a method in which materials that are not used anymore by people are processed in order to transform them in useful products. In the recent years, recycling has caused a lot of controversies whether if it is a good way to go green and help planet’s health or if it is just a big misconception driven by the media and the government. Some experts in the issue affirm that this practice is still running because recycling was transformed into a political issue that helps government and environmentalists to win
The idea that recycling will save all natural resources of the earth is just a myth; truly, in some cases the recycling processes waste more resources than the manufacturing process. Making recyclables generates waste. According to Peter Werbe (2003), all the water bottles are supposed to be recycled; but truly, just the ones with the number 1 or 2 printed at the bottom of the bottle can be recycled. He also states that recycling these bottles are only slightly better than letting them go into a landfill. Actually, he is being generous because if people compute the energy needed to ship a leftover designer water bottle to China along with millions of others to be reprocessed, manufactured into a new item, then shipped back to the U.S., transported to a mall, purchased, used, and finally landfilled; maybe it would be worse to recycle (Werbe, 2003). Even one of the best examples that environmentalist use to persuade people to recycle has had problems with the environment. Recycling water bottles does not always helps the environment or saves recourses; actually, sometimes it produces more pollution due to the energy used to transport the bottles and process them. Recycling sometimes could be even harmful than beneficial.
In addition, there is another factor to consider when people think about saving resources: the scarcity. Yet there is no environmental reason to recycle trash because resources are not scarce. For example, another example that