Recycling and Soil

 

Image from Science in the Classroom

People all over the world have a misconception on how recycling actually works, me included. Until I listened to and read a podcast called Recycling! Is it BS? In the episode, Kendra a climate journalist and the host Alex, they discuss the science to help listeners understand common misconceptions. They start by separating the difference between recycling as a waste issue and a climate issue. Yes, it’s waste, however, recycling things properly reduces greenhouse gases than just creating more.

The common individual in society might think they’re going good by putting their plastics in the blue bins and they’re doing a good job, however everyone needs to keep it up because if one person puts a greasy pizza box in the bin then they ruin it for everyone. What is actually causing more issues than everyone in society is big aluminum manufacturers creating something called Virgin Aluminum, its not recyclable and is so energy intensive that regular recyclable aluminum has a 95% smaller carbon footprint. So instead of making new things we should just recycle our aluminum cans.

Along with aluminum, most metals are easier to recycle than to create new ones. Another recycling misconception is paper, you can and should recycle it, but it can't be reused and constantly recycled like metals and glass. Paper has inherited limitations being from a tree and if it has ink or something on it then they need to go through a process which can't be repeated forever, returning the paper back to a papier-mâché like substance. It weakens the fibers and becomes less reliable and strong. We as a society are doing well with recycling, paper has an overall 70% correct recycling nationwide and everything else slowly declines. The reasons why companies make new metals and paper is for profit, they don’t care about the environment unless they’re properly recycling.

Image from newsforkids.net of plastics burning in Malaysia.

From the slide Intro to race in environment, we’ve learned in class that other countries such as Malaysia are being bullied by countries like China and even America to take our plastics. They do not have the infrastructure to deal with this many plastics, between January and July of 2019 Malaysia 450 thousand tons of plastic waste, 40% more than the whole of 2017. (Information found here) Recycling isn’t going to fix all our issues, what companies do is they reuse, then reduce how much they use, and then lastly, they then recycle what’s left and have someone else deal with it.

What the countries have resorted to doing is putting them in landfills near thriving ecological ecosystems like forests and ocean dumps. These landfills create poisonous effects for the organisms around them like fish and even people like us. Unfortunately for countries like Malaysia the plastic waste could earn them almost a billion in imports and burning alone. The burning of the fumes leads to people inheriting disease and maybe even killing them with the air pollution alone.

We, as a society, in Keene New Hampshire could do many things to positively impact our environment from the above mentioned crises. Keep up recycling properly, as an individual that is one of the biggest things we could do. Just because we know that our plastics are being send overseas does not mean all of our efforts are for naught. In the US we still do properly dispose of some plastics and reuse them properly. Another step we can take is to inform ourselves on where our trash and waste goes, say for example if you take your trash out without the help of the city, then consider having a compost bin instead of throwing all your perishable waste in the garbage. A broader thing we could do as a town is try to ask the local government about how we can more effectively purify our waste. We could, as Keene State Students, is hold our president Melinda Treadwell responsible for where and how our waste on campus gets disposed of, maybe as students we are very well educated but does the staff know what do to? Do they know how to handle waste properly?