Recycling

5 Pages 1130 Words

People Need to Recycle In the United Sates, where the population is inflated every year. The amount of space for landfills decreases every day. The need for recycling should not be asked, it should just be done out of habit. Everyone in America needs to recycle, to help the lamdfill problem, help the environment, and help produce new products from recycled goods. In America there is about two-hundred and eight tons of residential and commercial trash generated a year, 4.3 pounds per person a day (Prichard 1A). This is an overwhelming amount of trashed produced yearly. When people recycle this number can be drastically cut. But many people do not practice and use recycling. Consumers and businesses should use the three R’s; recycle, reuse, and recharge (Prichard 1A). Consumers and businesses are producing more garbage than ever before. As a result, we are rapidly running out of landfill space. In 1979 America had close to 18,500 landfills, and by 1991 that number was nearly cut in half (Prichard 10A). Kentucky, Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois will reach their maximum limit on landfills by the year 2005 (Prichard 10A). This whole garbage problem has forced us to try other options. Many of these options have been very unsuccessful. People have tried burning their garbage, that cause pollution to the environment. Some states even resorted to dropping their trash in the ocean, only to have the very same trash float ashore later. Dumping it on other states leads to feuding neighbors. Indiana passed a law to block imports of out-of-state trash, but a federal court ruled the law illegal (Prichard 10A). Instead of trying to find new ways to dump our trash, we need to find better ways to recycle it and save space in our landfills. In the 1970s there was a push to use recycled paper. A worker at a paper factory in Illinois states, “Then the issue was saving a tree. But trees are replaced. We plant them, we cut them, we plant them again” (Pendl...