Second Guessing

Do you think twice? It only takes a few seconds, the pales tend to be right next to each other.  Recycling or garbage?  Personally I have to say I make the wrong choice more often than not, walking down the stairs the garbage pales are right there all I have to do is out stretch my arm and drop the bottle.  But what if I took the extra five steps needed to recycle the bottle would it really make a difference?

            When throwing something in the trash, it takes little to no brainpower to do it.  You don’t have to think about what your doing a simple well practiced motion gets the garbage into the bin, simple, no thought required.  However I urge you to try and think about the repercussions to your actions, what happens now to that bottle that could have been recycled?  There are two main routes for garbage disposal incineration or landfills.  So materials that could have been reused are either being burnt or put into a whole in the ground.  Why put more slowly decomposable items into the Earth than necessary? There defiantly doesn’t seem like there is any good reasoning to, and people have started coming to this realization as well.  In 2000 the percent of solid waste recycled was 28.6%, and in 2010 34.1% of solid waste was recycled; that is a 5.5% increase in only ten years. 34.1% is the highest recorded percentage of solid waste ever recycled.  So why not try to keep the numbers rising?

As stated in yesterdays post there are blue recycle pales all over Elon’s campus so recycling here is not a very challenging task, but for you readers outside of campus this task may be slightly more difficult. So I challenge you this week to think twice before throwing a bottle into the trash can, to minimize the garbage we are putting into our planet.