Whether or not you believe in the global climate change, it’s important that every one of us takes an interest in preventable measures to save our natural resources and environments. For every ton of paper we recycle, we save 4,100 kilowatts of electricity for three hours and that means saved energy and saved trees. Saving trees is not only a concern, it’s imperative in a time when deforestation accounts for nearly 20 percent or more of global carbon dioxide emissions. Global deforestation is leaving behind desert and non-farmable land. If this continues. We can all say goodbye to the world as we know it.
According to conservation.org, human impacts including the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests and other natural habitats are largely responsible for increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are altering weather patterns worldwide, causing droughts and water shortages, more intense hurricanes and coastal storms, increased transmission of diseases and declining habitats for plant and animal species. Currently, we are seeing the beginning of the effects of our careless behavior and habits that will detrimentally get worse.
Styrofoam is not recyclable. You cannot make it into new Styrofoam, but the industry wants us to assume it does. But The Green Consumer recommends that you don’t buy it. 500 years from now, the coffee cup you may have used this morning will still be sitting in a landfill.
Among the many other daily products humans use on a daily basis, production, manufacturing and distribution all go into the things we use. The bottled water we carry, the bags that hold your snacks, cell phones, watches, pens, pencils and you name it: A natural resource was used.
We live in a fast-paced world. New things are on the market on a daily basis at our disposal. Our personal and professional lives keep us busy, and most Americans currently cannot fathom the effects of our carelessness. It’s so convenient to throw our trash in the garbage. After all, that’s how we were taught to take care of the things we do not need. If it is not possible to recycle, at least make sure your trash gets into the garbage. Still, to this day, we have problems seeing our garbage to the trashcans here on the Bakersfield College campus. You would think educated people have the sense to take their trash to conveniently placed disposal bins.
We’re not advocating the “hippie lifestyle,” just a common courtesy. Consider this: California alone is estimated to generate nearly 92 million tons of waste a year.
Theodore Roosevelt once said, “To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”
There are solutions to the problems we create although it would be best if they were not first created. For the future we, The Rip, urge you to recycle.