“Recycling” Why We Should
Recycling, we all know we should do more of it, but it is so easy to throw away that one can, bottle, or piece of paper. What could that one piece of paper, can, or bottle save? The truth is a lot! When you throw away one aluminum can, you waste as much energy as if you’d filled the same can half-full of gasoline and poured it into the ground (Oberlin College). It is also not just you that throws one recyclable item away every day. Billions of Americans throw away recyclables every day. On that scale the amount of recyclable waste thrown away every day ads up exponentially. The facts and numbers on how much of the earths resources are squandered and lost due to our lack of recycling are staggering.
How many aluminum cans do you use every day? One, two, a six pack? The energy saved by recycling a single aluminum can could run your television for three hours (Recycling Revolution). One recycled beer can equals one baseball game on television. How many beers do you drink when watching baseball?
The new Yankees stadium has 51,000 seats. If every person watching a Yankees game drank one beverage per hour out of an aluminum can then recycled that can, one three hour game would produce 153,000 cans. The electricity saved from recycling those cans instead of making new cans would power one television for 459,000 hours, or 19125 days, or 52 years. That’s a lot of baseball.
Right now Americans throw away enough aluminum to build a commercial fleet of airplanes every three months (Recycling Revolution). Thirty-six billion aluminum cans thrown in to landfills last year had a scrap value of more than 600 million dollars (Oberlin College). Some day in the future the world will be mining landfills instead of the earth for the resources buried there.
Now you’re thinking to yourself “boy am I glad I never throw away cans.” What about all of those glass bottles you naively toss in the trash? A modern glass bottle takes 4000 years... [continues]
Recycling, we all know we should do more of it, but it is so easy to throw away that one can, bottle, or piece of paper. What could that one piece of paper, can, or bottle save? The truth is a lot! When you throw away one aluminum can, you waste as much energy as if you’d filled the same can half-full of gasoline and poured it into the ground (Oberlin College). It is also not just you that throws one recyclable item away every day. Billions of Americans throw away recyclables every day. On that scale the amount of recyclable waste thrown away every day ads up exponentially. The facts and numbers on how much of the earths resources are squandered and lost due to our lack of recycling are staggering.
How many aluminum cans do you use every day? One, two, a six pack? The energy saved by recycling a single aluminum can could run your television for three hours (Recycling Revolution). One recycled beer can equals one baseball game on television. How many beers do you drink when watching baseball?
The new Yankees stadium has 51,000 seats. If every person watching a Yankees game drank one beverage per hour out of an aluminum can then recycled that can, one three hour game would produce 153,000 cans. The electricity saved from recycling those cans instead of making new cans would power one television for 459,000 hours, or 19125 days, or 52 years. That’s a lot of baseball.
Right now Americans throw away enough aluminum to build a commercial fleet of airplanes every three months (Recycling Revolution). Thirty-six billion aluminum cans thrown in to landfills last year had a scrap value of more than 600 million dollars (Oberlin College). Some day in the future the world will be mining landfills instead of the earth for the resources buried there.
Now you’re thinking to yourself “boy am I glad I never throw away cans.” What about all of those glass bottles you naively toss in the trash? A modern glass bottle takes 4000 years... [continues]
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