In today’s economy everyone is always talking about recycling, and how it can help the world. The majority of the population do recycle but there is still a percentage of the population that either don’t care to recycle or just don’t take the time to recycle. In my house, we have always made the effort to recycle and still recycle to this day. According to the Recycling Coalition of Utah, over 35 billion plastic bottles are thrown out a year but only 25% of it actually gets recycled in the United States. As a result of this failure to recycle, room on Earth is occupied by unnecessary bottles that will end up taking about 1,000 years for it to fully decompose.

Although some people do recycle, such as my own family along with the majority of my neighborhood, there are some who still need to join in on the action. Not only is this lack of recycling sad in the sense of unwanted material taking up space on Earth, but also because it’s not hard to put in the effort. It’s just one more bin you need to put out on trash day since we have curb side recycling in Massachusetts.

In addition to recycling benefiting us and the Earth, it will also benefit animals. You always hear on the radio, news channel, etc. about how some bird got killed because it got caught in plastic or some other animal died from eating some recycled material that was just thrown out. Therefore, recycling isn’t only for us. There was a Facebook post I read the other day about a whale who died and “sent us a message”, the whales’ stomach was full of recycled material that should have been recycled. Additionally, we are the generation that needs to start caring more about our planet. As of now, we have a huge pollution problem, so if we take action in order to dissipate this problem now. In order to start this revolution, we can begin by just recycling plastic bottles, because it can start turning around our pollution problem. Every day I will see kids in the dorm that have plastic bottles who just throw them in the trash carelessly. Sadly, these kids even do it when a recycling barrel is right next to them. If it’s right next to you, why not use it? According to MRC Polymers, only 27% of plastic bottles are recycled each year. Therefore, these kids carelessly throwing the water bottles away contribute to this small percentage of recycling and need to increase this percentage by recycling their bottles versus carelessly throwing them away.

On another positive note to increasing the recycling percentage, recycling these bottles can save twice as much energy used by decreasing the amount of trash companies need to decompose. As a result, you are not only helping the environment by recycling, but also you aren’t wasting energy. Furthermore, when you burn trash you burn about 1,000 to 2,000 gallons of gasoline to 1 ton of plastic. Not only do you save about 66% of energy when using these recycled materials to create products, but you also reserve raw, everyday materials. When recycling, we don’t realize how much oil, energy, and time we can save. Also you don’t need to go out of your way to recycle it’s always around us. Most businesses and schools have recycling bins that you can throw your plastic out in—so have a heart and do your part.