WHY RECYCLE?:

WHY RECYCLE?:

Recycling Conserves Energy:

The benefit of recycling is the reuse of materials; recycling something will reduce the energy required o make another version of that product by 80-95%.

Waste Disposal contributes to global warming:

Land filling is a contributor to global warming. As trash decomposes, it creates a gas called methane, which is just as much of a contributor to global warming as the much maligned CO2.

Burning waste avoids the need to put trash in landfills, and it has one other great benefit:
it can produce power! Burning waste is similar to burning coal, except you need four times as much of it to produce the same amount of power.

There is no doubt that incinerating trash is much better, pound for pound,for the greenhouse effect than land filling trash. “In the landfill, one tonne of [trash] would produce approximately 62 m³ methane by anaerobic digestion of the biodegradable part of the waste. This amount of methane has more than twice the global warming potential than the one tonne of CO2, which would have been produced by incineration.”

Regardless of its processing technique, the waste that goes out your door is going to pollute the atmosphere. It makes sense to reduce the quantity as much as we can.

Recycling Conserves Resources:

Paper and Cardboard require trees. While trees are a renewable resource,they are super useful for things like taking CO2 out of the air and providing us with oxygen to breath. We should try to keep as many of them around as possible.

Plastics require oil, and we all know the troubles around that resource. Glass requires….um….sand and limestone? Aluminum cans need aluminum. These three resources are finite, and the processes required
to extract them from the earth are pretty intrusive, risk lives, and leave a big environmental scar.

[Source: Brave Nnew Leaf: http://www.bravenewleaf.com]