The Importance of Recycling

Recycling can prevent wastage of natural resources, can prevent pollution, can provide more job opportunities, can save the environment, and can create more useful items.

1. Recycle can prevent wastage of resources. a. Can save raw materials. i. Some raw materials are available only through expensive mining process and pollutants. ii. Helps to preserve important natural resources such as water, timber, and minerals. iii. Its helps to save the cost of management waste.

b. Economic benefits. i. Can reduce the inflation of prices of the raw materials and resources.

ii. Helps in saving a lot of expense, demanded for the production of new production from ‘original’ materials or resources. iii. Companies can earn extra income by selling paper for recycle. c. To decrease the levels of destruction of our natural resources. i. Recycle paper can reduce the amount of deforestation. ii. Reduce the amount of landslide. iii. To reduce the amount of mining.

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2. Recycling also can prevent pollution (3 main types: air pollution, water pollution, land pollution.) a.

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Air pollution. i. Factories and industries manufacturing items made from plastic and metals release large amount of toxic gases. ii. Recycle can reduce the production of new items so that factories won’t release too many harmful gases. iii. Open burning due to too many unwanted items.

b. Water pollution. i. Factories or industries dump waste in seas and oceans. ii. Produced by chemical used in manufacturing process. iii. Power plants. c. Save energy. i. Recycling used materials reduce energy requirements in many manufacturing process so that pollution can be reduced.

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ii. Recycling paper save almost 65% energy than making new sheets of paper. iii. Saving energy would subsequently help us turn earth into a greener planet.

3. Recycling can provide more job opportunities. a. Fresh graduate. i. To help fresh graduate gain more working experience to prepare them for their future work. ii. To implant fresh graduate concept about the importance of recycling while they are working. iii. To help them earn extra income to support their cost of living.

b. Retired people or old people. i. Allow retired people to earn some extra income. ii. To let the old people make use of their free time instead of do nothing every day. iii. To train them become more independent, able to support their own cost of living and reduce the burden of theirs son and daughter.

c. Unemployed people. i. To let them have the opportunities to work. ii. Can prevent them become criminals that just to earn their income. iii. Allow them to help in contribute for the growth of economic of country.

4. Recycle can save the environment. a. To prevent global warming. i. The rising temperature has caused the polar caps to melt, thus resulting in an increase of ocean water, raising sea levels, etc. ii. Global warming can lead to the extinction of earth.

b. Recycle can reduce the wanton destruction of rain forests. i. Maintain our ecosystem. ii. Can save many species of plants and animals that are on the brink of extinction. iii. The amount of natural disasters such as mudslide, flood, etc. can be reduced.

c. Recycling helps in lowering the greenhouse gas emissions and land fillings. i. Land filling is the oldest and the crudest way of disposing waste. ii. Lot of our garbage is disposed off in land fillings. iii. Too many un-recycle items will cause greenhouse gas emissions.

5. Recycle can help in create more useful items. a. Artworks. i. People can use recycle items to make handcrafts. ii. Can help in stimulate young people creativity. iii. Some country had hold competition create creative items by using recycled items.

b. Save money. i. People can reuse recycled items in their daily life. ii. They can use cartons as their trashes. iii. Some people use recycled items to decorate their houses.

c. Technology. i. A lot country nowadays trying to use recycle items to manufacture smart cars. ii. Solar energy items. iii. Government encourages industries to develop products using recycle items.

The importance of recycling

According to Chief Seattle, an Indian who lived in the western part of North America in the 1800s, “Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” This statement illustrates the importance of taking care of the earth, not merely to avoid global warming, but to preserve the natural balance of the planet. An essential problem of the 21st century is world pollution. Some of the most pressing problems are the destruction of natural habitats, the depletion of natural resources, and the polluting of rivers, lakes, and oceans. One idea now debated is whether or not the government should require communities to participate in recycling programs. What’s the deal with recycling? It is such an important environmental issue, and yet it seems as though there isn’t much done about it as a community. If you ask a random person on the street what they think about recycling, nine times out of ten they’ll smirk and tell you “It’s good for the environment.”

But, really, they don’t understand the significance of recycling. Although the concept of recycling is preached in the schools, on the television set, and on billboards, people don’t take it seriously enough. Our nature has provided abundant resources for us to use and live with. But we humans use these resources for our convenience and we polluted the environment. This action will transform earth to a non-livable place. Now, it is our responsibility to preserve the natural resources so that our successors can live a healthy life. Everyone can help the environment by recycling the things we use. We can recycle almost everything we use. But, before we start recycling, we must first understand what is recycling? According to the Wikipedia, recycling is the processing used materials into new products to prevent waste of potentially useful materials, reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, reduce energy usage, reduce pollution, and lower greenhouse gas emissions as compared to virgin production. Normally, the recycling process involves three stages.

First of all, the old products or unwanted products are collected and processed, where they are sorted, cleaned and made ready for recycling new products. Second stage involves the manufacturing of new products from the raw material obtained by the processing of the old products. Finally, the process ends with the purchasing of recycled goods by the consumers. Recycling is important because recycling can prevent wastage of natural resources, can prevent pollution, can provide more job opportunities, can save the environment, and can create more useful items. Recycle can prevent wastage of natural resources. Generally, we can save raw materials through recycling. Why this is important? This is because some raw materials are available only through expensive mining process and pollutants. According to Office for National Statistics (2011, “Inflation Threat Grows as Raw Material Costs are Passed on to Customers”), rising oil prices, combined with the conflict in Libya, are expected to push the cost of raw materials even higher in the future.

This shows that how important are the raw materials and a little change in any factors could raise the prices of raw materials easily. Therefore, we should prevent those things from happening through recycling. Besides, recycling also helps to preserve important natural resources such as water, timber, and minerals and hence reduces our impact on the environment. For example, demand for paper and cardboard is threatening ancient woodlands. If used papers are recycle or reuse, this helps in preserving the natural resources since we don’t need to produce more new papers. Other than that, recycle helps to save the cost of management waste. According to Friend of the Earth (“Beyond the Bin, Economics of Waste Management Options, a Summary Reports”,2000), when comparing landfill, incineration and recycling, recycling has considerable economic merit. Recycling instead of sending waste to landfill avoids the payment of landfill tax and potential LATS fines while incineration is expensive because it is not a low cost alternative for meting LATS targets. The Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme, LATS, is an initiative by the UK government, through DEFRA to help reduce the amount of biodegradable municipal waste (BMW) sent to landfill.

Recycling also meet economic beneficial. It’s not only reducing the inflation of prices of the raw materials and resources but also helps in saving a lot of expense, demanded for the production of new production from ‘original’ materials or resources. It is well known that extracting virgin materials is a key cause of global habitat loss. Virgin materials need to be refined and processed to create products, requiring vast amount of energy and the use of polluting chemicals further causing the destruction of habitats. For example, making one tone of aluminum needs 4 tons of chemicals and 8 tones of bauxite, and it takes 95 per cent less energy to make a recycled aluminum can than it does to make one from virgin materials. This show how recycle helps in cut down the expense. Also, companies can earn extra income by selling paper for recycle.

According to the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance, the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. If they recycle all the paper, it’s not only let them earn extra income but also help to save the environment. Moreover, recycling can decrease the levels of destruction of our natural resources. Recycle paper can reduce the amount of deforestation hence reduce the amount of landslide since we don’t need timber to produce new paper. Recycle soft drink cans help to reduce the amount of mining of raw materials. By practice recycling, it does also prevent pollution. There are 3 main types of pollution: air pollution, water pollution, and land pollution. Air pollution is caused by emission of large amount of toxic gases, by factories and industries that manufacturing items made form plastic and metals. But, Pike. K (2006, p.6) stated in her book, “Go Facts Recycling”, that recycling materials creates less air pollution than making products from materials that have not been previously used and the average Australian household saves more than three kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions through recycling each week.

This also shows that how recycling can helps in reduce the amount of pollution. Recycle can reduce the production of new items so that factories won’t release too much harmful gases. Recycling our waste also means less burning of rubbish, which causes air pollution, and less rubbish rotting in dumps, which produces methane. Next, water pollution is caused by factories or industries that dump waste in seas and oceans. Other than that, water pollution also caused by chemical used in manufacturing process. Through recycling, this pollution can be avoided. Recycling can save energy too. Recycling used materials reduce energy requirements in many manufacturing process so that pollution can be reduced. For example, almost 65% of energy can be saved when making paper by using the recycled materials. Saving energy would subsequently help us turn earth into a greener planet. Recycling is able to provide more job opportunities to fresh graduate, retired citizens, and unemployed people.

The process of recycling and composting, from curbside collection to the sorting and reprocessing of recyclables, create a lot of job opportunities. LEPU (“Jobs from Recycling: Report on Stage II of the Research”, 2004), studies have estimated (conservatively) that for every tone recycled 5.9 jobs are created. For fresh graduate, recycling could help them in gaining more working experience to prepare them for their future work. Besides, it is also a good chance to implant concept about the importance of recycling while they are working within themselves. For retired citizens, recycling allow them to earn some extra income and to let the old people make full use of their free time instead of doing nothing every day. Recycling also helps to train them become more independent because they need to collect the recycle items by themselves to earn money. For unemployed people, recycle create a job chance for them. This can prevent them from becoming criminals that just to earn their income. In addition, they are also able to contribute for the growth of economic of country since they are being hired for work.

Like killing two birds with one stone, recycle not only provided job opportunities but also contributes for the growth of economic. That’s why recycle is more and more important in nowadays. Undeniable, recycle can save the environment. Nowadays, the rising temperature has caused the polar caps to melt, thus resulting in an increase amount of ocean water, raising sea levels, etc. which had caused global warming. To quote Henry David Thoreau, “what’s the use of a house if you don’t have a tolerable planet to put it on?” If the problem of global warming continues to happen, all living creatures are going to extinct. Global warming can lead to the extinction of earth. Therefore, in order to prevent that from happening in the future, we should start to recycle now. Recycle used items allows people stop hurting the earth. At least 30% of global warming can be reduced through recycling. Besides, recycle can reduce the wanton destruction of rain forests. Recycling helps to maintain our ecosystem because people can produce new products through the recycled materials instead of using or mining a raw material. This can prevent our rain forests being destroyed. Additionally, many species of plants and animals that are on the brink of extinction inside the rain forests also can be saved by practicing the habits of recycling.

This is because human can use the recycled items to replace the new products and this allows humans to decrease the amount of mining new materials from the rain forests. Hence, it’s helps to protect our ecosystem. In pace with the demand of humans towards new raw materials falls, they will not going to mining new raw materials often. Therefore, the amount of natural disasters such as mudslide, flood, etc. can be reduced since there are less people to mine new raw materials. This also shows how important recycling saves the environment. On the other hand, recycling can helps in lowering the greenhouse gas emissions and land fillings. Land filling is the oldest and the crudest way of disposing waste. Lot of our garbage is disposed off in land fillings and too many un-recycle items will cause greenhouse gas emissions. According to ERM (“Impact of Energy from Waste and Recycling Policy on UK Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Final Report for Defra”, 2006), it shows that although recycling uses energy, overall it reduces climate emissions, as recycling a material generally uses far less energy than manufacturing from virgin materials.

This conclusion is confirmed by many studies, including a recent study done for the Government by the consultants ERM, and a study carried out for the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). The WRAP study assessed the relative greenhouse gas savings associated with current UK levels of recycling for paper/cardboard, glass, plastics, aluminum and steel, and concluded: “The UK’s current recycling of those materials saves between 10-15 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year compared to applying the current mix of landfill and incineration with energy recovery to the same materials. This is equivalent to about 10 per cent of the annual carbon dioxide emissions from the transport sector, and equates to taking 3.5 million cars off UK roads.” For example, if you recycle waste paper you save three times energy as it is produced by burning to produce energy. Recycling plastic saves five times the energy created by burning it. All examples above show how recycling helps in lowering the greenhouse gas emissions and land fillings. Recycle can help in create more useful items.

Nowadays, people use recycled items to perform artworks. People can use recycle items such as soft drink cans, recycled paper/cardboard and recycled plastic bottle to make handcrafts. In addition, this could help in stimulating young people’s creativity. In order to encourage the young people to participate in this type of activity, some country had hold competition of inventing creative item by using recycled items and giving reward to the winner. This is a part of the importance of recycle. Without recycle, this type of activity would not appear. Other than that, recycle save money too. In daily life, people can reuse recycled items. For example, they can use cartons as their waste bin, use plastic bottles as their container to fund money and etc. Some people even used recycled items to decorate their houses. They put soft drink cans that they collected in a rack as a collection or maybe they can use the recycled cloth to make their curtains.

What’s the deal with technology and recycle? A lot country nowadays trying to use recycle items to manufacture smart cars. Also, they try to use the recycled item to invent become solar energy items. It is glad that government nowadays encourages industries to develop products using recycle items in order to fulfill the condition to save the environment. Conclusion, recycling is only a part of the solution to save the environment, but it is an easy and important first step to fight pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Recycling aids in maintaining limited resources and is not too difficult to imply. People are happy to lend a hand in deceleration of the global warming process. Overall, recycling supports the earth and supports life. So, we as human beings that use and live within the earth, we have the responsibility to take care of it. A little change we make today will become a big effort in saving earth in the future. Chief Seattle said the world is interconnected, so taking care of the earth is like taking care of our home.

Importance of Recycling

Do you hear that? That is the sound of mother earth crying out. She is crying because the air is constantly being polluted by industrial smoke; she's crying because of global warming; she is crying because of contaminated water. Her feelings are immensely hurt because she is under the impression that you do not care she is suffering. Well, there is a way we can flip the script and save the mother earth from her pain. This something very easy and simple thing that everyone can be doing across the globe daily to help save our planet. The answer is recycling. Recycling is the process of turning used materials and waste into new products to prevent the waste of potentially useful materials. Recycling is the single most important task in relieving our planet from all the pain we have caused it. Recycling diminished landfills, save money and create job opportunities, and also reduce deforestation.

The first reason we should recycle is because it diminishes landfills. A landfill is a site for the disposal of waste materials by burial. It is the oldest form of waste treatment. Historically, landfills have been the most common method of organized waste disposal and remain in so many places around the world.The US has 3,091 active landfills, just imaging how many there are in the world. These landfills are not suitable for mother earth, "when organic material such as food scraps and green waste are put in landfills, it is generally compacted down and covered. This removes the oxygen and causes it to break down in an anaerobic process. Eventually, this releases methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide."( In addition, the department of health says that "landfills produce objectionable odors and landfill gas that can move through soil and collect in nearby buildings. Of the gases produced in landfills, ammonia, sulfides, methane, and carbon dioxide are of most concern."( Many items that are placed in landfills takes years to decompose, and some items such as glass never decompose. With the rapid recent increase in human population, over-population is started to become a concern. We could potentially run out of land and no-one wants to be living next to a landfill.

Additionally, another reason we should recycle is because it saves money and creates more job opportunities. Simply put, recycling is less expensive than waste removal fees.Waste collection is measured by weight therefore by recycling and throwing less away, you are reducing your waste disposal costs. Depending on what materials you recycle, your business could potentially make money off the recycling program. Former prime minister of Malaysia, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, said at an environmental conference: "Currently, our country needs to spend 400 mil just to manage these waste" and "Just by recycling as much as 22% of the 5 million tons of waste produced each year could save the government 88 mill a year." ( The goal is to be saving as much money as possible and we can do this by recycling. All the millions of dollars that are being saved by recycling could be used somewhere else. Recycling also creates jobs for people and gives them a way to provide for their families. If the "U.S. had a recycling rate of 75% by 2030 it would create 1.1 million new jobs."( The jobs that recycling create include collecting, processing and preparing materials, making new products from recycled materials which is called manufacturing, and reuse and remanufacturing. We have seen a drive for job creation in the European Union.  "The E.U. could add another 560,000 new jobs by meeting its goal of recycling 70% of discards. Jobs from recycling grew 7% per year in the E.U. between 2000 and 2007."

The last reason we should recycle is because it lessens deforestation. Deforestation is the removal of a forest or stand of trees where the land is thereafter converted into a non-forest use. This can have a negative impact on the environment because eighty percent of earth's land animals and plants live in forests, and many cannot survive the deforestation that destroys their homes. This is why we see the extinction of many plants and animals because they are unable to survive in any other habitat but their own. Deforestation not only destroys the habitat of these animals, it also pollutes the atmosphere. But, with recycling we can fix this issue by reusing products and waste materials and make new items.

Did you know that "each ton of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatts of energy and 7,000 gallons of water?" Just imagine if everyone in the world recycled how much resources and energy we could save. When people choose not to recycle they are the ones responsible for causing the world so much pain. It is important to make recycling a priority in your every-day lives so we can moderate landfills, decrease deforestation, and create a way to save and make money. Now go do your part in helping keep the world were live in green.

Updated: Sep 29, 2022
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The Importance of Recycling. (2016, Jun 08). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-importance-of-recycling-essay

The Importance of Recycling essay
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