Why Recycling Matters

Why Recycling Matters

 

Yesterday, 18th March 2019, marked the second annual Global Recycling Day. The awareness day was created to help recognise and celebrate the importance recycling plays in preserving our precious primary resources and securing the future of our planet. As it stands the planet is in a pretty poor state, green houses gasses are raising daily, landfills are at breaking point and the oceans are filling with plastic. It is easy to think that we are a plastic cup away from complete disaster and although that is an over exaggeration it should be a thought in the back of everyone?s minds. We must start planning for our future today before it is too late.  

Global Recycling Day has come at a time where the environment has been hot in the news. Over the last couple of weeks we have seen the use of single use plastics all over the headlines as the EU have promised to ban them by 2021, prompting the question will the UK do the same? In other news these past weeks we have also seen children across the world leave their school lessons in protest of the lack of action against climate change. The environment being in the news isn?t a new thing though, we have been aware of the damage we are causing our planet for a long time but it has been ignored to the point where we must now act, and quickly.

Unfortunately the statistics for plastic in the ocean make for grim reading, every day approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans meaning there may now be around 5.25 trillion macro and micro plastic pieces floating in the open ocean, weighing up to 269,000 tonnes. This is an astonishing and frankly disgusting amount of plastic and it has a detrimental effect on wildlife. Recent statistics show that 100,000 marine mammals and turtles and 1 million sea birds are killed by marine plastic pollution annually. We as a race are polluting other species natural habitats and killing them on mass every year.

On the land however ?.it is just as bad, we throw away single use products on mass every day. These products are not bio degradable, can take centuries to decompose and can?t be recycled. 25 billion Styrofoam cups, that take 500 years to decompose in a landfill, are thrown away every year creating a deficit that will take years to get out of. So what can be done? Well I believe single use plastics should be banned, they are needless, can?t be recycled a lot of the time and pollute oceans relentlessly. On top of that a lot more has to be done on the recycling front, at the moment only 34% of waste made by Americans is recycled, recovered or reused and they are one of the most advanced countries in the world.

Recycling really can help to fix the situation we find ourselves in, just recycling aluminium cans saves 95% of the energy used to make new cans and stops them from polluting the environment they would otherwise be in. Recycling helps clear rubbish and stops the depletion of finite resources as well as reducing the amount of emissions created in production. So if you take anything from this blog please make it the want to recycle and make a difference.