The earth is more than 4.5 billion years old and nature has given humanity more than we could ever ask for but still, we ask for new things. Actually, we don’t ask we just take, and sometimes taking has done good things but most of the time it just leads to destruction and that’s what happened, leaving us with all the environmental problems we are facing today. Global warming, air pollution, sea pollution, and the list goes on.
And people with awareness all over the world have been trying their best to make the unaware people understand how we or the near future generations would never be able to see the earth the way it is right now if this continues. And it is a bit surprising how many people have been trying to do their best in keeping the environment as secure as possible. And one of the major solutions as stated by the environment specialists is recycling.
Recycling doesn’t just mean making use of discarded plastic or clothes. It means finding a way to reuse anything that can be reused. It can be clothes, plastics, wood, literally anything. Where do you think all the rusted metal goes to? Yes, that’s right! Metal recycling does exist. It is scary how according to the carbon footprint calculations environmentalists say that we might need more than 8 earths if everyone lived like a person from New York City with a car. And more than 3 earths if we all live the same way we do right now.
Getting back to recycling it works differently for different things, for example, plastic is recycled in a factory and molded into things that can be used again. And metal is extracted from various sources like crashed cars, containers, etc and recycled. However, scrap metal recycling hasn’t been as known as it is today so it’s best to make use of it.
Nevertheless, recycling has its limits. Think about it this way one person works for a day and then wakes up does the same thing but there is a limit and at a point, we leave this place. In the same way, there is only so much we can stop with recycling. Anything can be recycled a certain amount of times and after that, it has to be discarded. Some things can be discarded without thinking but things like plastics can never be discarded without causing harm to nature and this explains why cutting out the usage as much as possible is the only fully effective solution.
How does recycling work? As mentioned before the things that can be recycled are collected. They undergo several processes to again be used and in doing so we are still causing contamination. Maybe not as much as avoiding recycling completely but it’s almost the same.
It is in fact very hard to just quit using non-biodegradable things but ignoring the threats they are causing to the environment and still using them the same way we did before is not a responsible way to respond to the situation. The earth has given us so much it is about time we return something!