Beau Carefelle

Ms. Sanchez
English IV
13 April 2015
Recycling
Over 25 trillion styrofoam coffee cups are thrown away each year, just by
americans (Hodgins). As humans that are living on this earth people should be trying to save the
earth so that later generations can be appreciative that we saved the earth from our own faults.
Right now the way we live our daily lives we waste paper and we are going no where good, but
we can turn this around and start in a new direction. 24 trees are cut down to make 1 ton of
newspaper (Hodgins). If we were able to just read the news on our computer then we would not
have to cut down 24 trees just to get the newspaper for like one city to read the newspaper when
not that many actually read it like that. Recycling is way important because recycling conserves
resources, saves energy, and reduces landfill.
People claim that the only way for us to save the world is for us stop living. You should
recycle if you live on earth because it saves our resources. Saving resources will have some for
the other generations to be able to use to in there daily lives, so why would we use up all of there
resources to use just so live more comfortable. Some of the resources on our earth actually can
be used then melted down and then made into a brand new item from the same resources.
Aluminum cans can actually be recycled and put back onto the shelf at your local grocery store
in just about 2 months. (Hall, 12) Just recycling saves nearly a whole forest and probably
hundreds of animals that live in those trees. so saving things like this are made to make sure it

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totally makes sense to make it there. If we recycled all newspapers, we could save over 250
million trees each and every year. (Hall, 12) Recycling a single days worth of the New Yorks
Times could save 75,000 trees or more. (Hall 16). I think that there should be no newspaper
because its a waste of paper, even if it can be recycled, all the important information can be
broadcasted on a radio station or news on the internet.Half a million trees have to be cut down
just to produce the Sunday newspapers each week. (Hall 18). The use of trees really should be
cut down to bare minimum because less than half of our population probably reads the news
paper anyways and the energy and cost of losing the tress is something that can be over took by
the thoughts that bring in the specific ideas in certain times. Its important to conserve these
resources so that we have them when our kids get to be apart of the earth and live with us on
earth.
As this subject continues to be looked down on people realize that recycling is happening
every where and is a growing process. We should all recycle our trash because it saves energy.
Virgin materials are what makes our earth beautiful and if we use them it costs energy to get
them out so we could just reuse the material we already got and use little energy to renew the
material. If we manufacture products using recycled materials, we reduce the need for virgin
materials and save the energy required to extract and process them (Pacuo). Having recycled
material is no difference then the virgin material made glass bottles are a perfect example of this
because you drink out of a glass bottle that has been remade probably over ten times now and
thats a glass bottle that was not dug out of the ground to make a fresh bottle but a new one from
an old one. By recycling just 1 ton of aluminum cans, we conserve more than 207 million Btu,
the equivalent of 36 barrels of oil or 1,665 gallons of gasoline (Pacuo). You use aluminum cans

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in everyday use for some people and probably the first thing you think about when you talk
about recycling which makes up thirty percent of the recycled trash material .We saved more
than 1.3 quadrillion Btu of energy, the equivalent of over 229 million barrels of oil (Reubold).
The Energy that we saved can be used to make electric wind mills or solar panels to save more
energy so that our planet wont kill itself and we could have more and more extra energy each
year. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, recycling an aluminum can
requires less than 5 percent of the energy (Hodgins). Saving energy at little bits can make a big
difference over time so that we head in the right direction and not living in the dust area. It
makes sense to save energy so that we have energy in the future to use for the same uses that we
have now and maybe some futuristic things.
Another reason for people to recycle their trash then throwing it away is that it ends up in
landfills which are just areas that are reserved as places for trash to be piled up almost as tall as a
big hill. Everyone in the world should recycle because doing so helps to reduce landfills. All our
trash goes into landfills. Landfills are areas that are mapped out with no living things because its
just huge hills of just trash and junk that is meant to sit there and degrade in the ground. One of
the biggest problems about landfills is that theyre running out of space at a rate of one a
day (Bily, 16). Landfills do not lose any of the trash thats in it already it just keeps piling up to
make it bigger and bigger. There is so much garbage in the world, that a landfill in New York
can be seen from space (Bily, 14). Being be able to see something from space is a special event
but it does not seem like a special event when it is the trash from just Americans. Purchase
materials that require less packaging. When possible, purchase recycled products (Bily 34). It is
possible for packages to be bought with less packaging on them and they can help out the

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amount of trash that is added to the landfills each year. If youre an average American, you are
contributing nearly 4.5 pound a day 56 tons a year of garbage that is carted off to
landfills (Bily, 7). If we were to all just recycle we more then we do we could save the world
approximately twice its life span right now if we were to carry out the way we live today. People
should be out trying to reduce landfills because it is gross that there are square mile places where
they make trash mountains.
One might say that recycling takes more energy to recycle then it does to just throw it
away. Maybe were not really saving energy by recycling all our trash. Some items take a lot of
heat to be able to recycle it into something new. It may take more energy to recycle a given
product than it did to make it originally (Sawyer). Each and every bottle has to be cleaned out to
make sure its not dirty and it might mean that getting all the water and chemicals would take way
more energy then just throwing it in the garbage to wait for it happen. The recycling industry
requires more water and certain expensive chemicals to remove ink from paper so that the
product can then be recycled (Sawyer). Nothing can be done about the people who know this
but most are lead to think that recycling saves energy but it saves more resources then energy.
People have to be recycling because it saves resources, also saves energy, and reduces
trash in landfills. Each American uses around 680 pounds of paper each year, and most people
just throw it away instead of recycling it for further use (Pacuo). If we recycle we have the
resources to use when our children get to live with us in a world just like the one we grew up in.
Recycling helps to conserve energy and as a result less greenhouse gases are emitted (Pacuo).
If we were to save energy we would be able to accomplish easily just as much as we did the
years before without wasting any were near the amount of resources that we did use up. 2000

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pounds of recycled paper can actually help to save 17 trees, over 350 gallons of oil, and a lot of
landfill space (Pacuo). Just recycling paper could lessen the amount of waste in landfills to save
the mountains of trash that are growing bigger. I conclude this with saying that everyone should
be recycling to save the earth from our own destruction.