5 Reasons To Recycle

Recycling is one of those activities that we’re taught at a very young age, but it somehow didn’t seem to catch on with a lot of people. Mostly due to convenience, many opt to simply throw items away without much regard for recycling. In fact, only about one in every three Americans actively recycles. That’s still a massive increase from the one out of 20 there were a half century ago, but it’s still not enough. Here are a few reasons why you should be helping to increase that number today.

5. It Saves You Money

There are some people that believe recycling their items is more expensive than simply throwing them in the trash, leading them to avoid recycling. However, when playing the long game, you’re saving yourself money by recycling. More recycling leads to more businesses saving money on materials and not having to increase costs. You can also make pocket change for yourself by recycling cans or papers. This is especially true in the state of Michigan where you get a $0.10 refund on a deposit per can or bottle that’s recycled.

4. Helps You Breathe Better

Naturally, to have better air quality, we need more trees since they take in carbon dioxide and then use it to release the oxygen that we breathe. In the past few decades, though, trees have been cut down left and right for the sake of paper and other material goods. Even though the newspaper isn’t the most popular form of media anymore, recycling all of the newspapers in the United States each year alone would help to save around a quarter billion trees.

3. For Your Health

The alternative to recycling is to simply discard anything and everything into the environment, and it can lead to some nasty side effects. This is especially true of toxic liquids that are being poured into bodies of water, and the entire community can feel its presence. With less water, land and air pollution, the amount of diseases in areas that recycle more are reduced drastically. Zurich, Switzerland was found to be the least polluted city in the world, and the life expectancy is 84 years, which is also among the tops in the world.

2. Job Creation

We’re all feeling the crunch in today’s economy, and a lot of people are currently left without jobs. It has been shown through studies, though, that recycling creates a lot of jobs, with over 750,000 in the United States alone. If people recycled at a ¾ rate in the country, then there would be more than 1 million new jobs created within the next decade. This amounts to almost 10 times the amount of jobs that are created by landfills, and billions of dollars would be put back into the economy.

1. Our Future Depends On It

Simply put, our atmosphere is heating up so fast due to global warming that experts are predicting that catastrophic events will continue to happen until it’s too late. If you want to set up the world for future generations, then you should be recycling immediately. This will help to cut down on greenhouse gasses and emissions as we cut down on new production. “Any time you use renewable resources, or secondary resources, there’s less carbon emitted than if you use primary sources,” says author Adam Minter.