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For plastic and glass, to make you feel better. Even if you're concerned about land use, they end up throwing away a lot of what goes into the recycling anyway.
by elil17 6y ago
For plastic and glass, to make you feel better. Even if you're concerned about land use, they end up throwing away a lot of what goes into the recycling anyway. With glass especially, it is actually worse for the enviroment to reuse the glass because of the energy and water use associated with cleaning it. (There's also an argument to be made that we should continue to recycle plastic so the public is in the habit of sorting their trash if we ever come up with a way to do it efficiently)
For aluminum, recycling is incredibly important. It reduces the need for environmentally-destructive aluminum mining and energy intensive smelting.
For paper, recycling high quality paper like clean office paper and some cardboard reduces the demand for virgin wood pulp. Lower quality paper gets thrown away.
Also, shout-out to composting - food and yard scraps breaking down in a well aerated environment produces fewer greenhouse gasses than landfills.
- spookthesunset 6y agoIt is amazing how much stuff you can compost. In my armchair quarterback opinion compost everything you can and recycle only metal. If people are pissed about how much stuff they are throwing into the trash... go look at the incredible amount of packaging material that gets thrown out....
- stjohnswarts 6y agoHow many people have backyards to compost stuff and the time to do it? 25%?
- elil17 6y agoBackyard composting piles aren't really the solution in my opinion (they're great if you can do them, but few people ever will). We need municipal compost pickup. My city actually has this - we were all given bright green compost bins and instructions for composting. The amazing thing about municipal composting is that they can handle way more types of food scraps (e.g. bones and fruit pits) than backyard composting bins. They come pick it up every week just like the trash and recycling. Unfortunately, it seems like I'm one of two or three people on my street who compost my food scraps every week. I think composting should really be easier for people to figure out than recycling - it's so simple to know what you should and should not compost (as it says on the front of every green bin, "If it grows, it goes").