When you walk by that green recycling can and toss your paper, plastic, can etc. in to it, what are you thinking? Do you even know what you are doing and why? I know, I know, "I am recycling so I can help do my part in saving the environment." I do not believe that many of us have actually thought about what happens to our recyclables and what process goes in to them being recycled. Are we really saving the planet or could we actually be hurting it still?
Yes, recycling is good for the earth and is not all 100% bad, however we do not realize quite how bad it is. The main ways in which recycling hurts the environment are…
- Contamination gets around
- Air pollution
- Paper sludge
- Oil refining contamination
- It encourages consumption and being wasteful in other ways
When you recycle things that may have toxins or impurities in it and it is made in to something else, the toxins and impurities are usually just transferred over in to the new product. These new products could be soda cans or water bottles that we are putting our mouths on and drinking or eating from. Hundreds of buildings in Taiwan have been constructed using recycled steel which has just been found out to be giving people gamma radiation poisoning for years now. The trucks used for transferring your recyclables and the machines used to recycle them are are creating many airborne toxins. In many areas, recycling plants are proven to be the biggest polluters of that area. The paper that you recycle is all mixed up and cleaned off, so all of the runoff which is called "paper sludge" contains all of the ink and chemicals and is then either burned (releasing toxins into the air) or sent to a landfill where it can run off into your groundwater.
This closely relates to Bell's An Invitation To Environmental Sociology when he talks about virtual environmentalism which is "environmentalism that lies behind and beneath our daily lives" (Bell 283). We are not thinking of what we are really doing when we toss our products in to the recycling can, which is bad in this case. While we think we are saving the earth, we are doing it in such a way that is only increasing our main environmental problems. We need to stand up and find different, more environmentally safe ways in which we can recycle our goods or else we will just keep going around in this continuous circle while the environment, the place we call home, suffers.
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