I’ve noticed a problem in the lunch room lately, we have recycling bins, yet people either throw away recyclable products or misuse the recycling bins. I don’t know how many Ice bottles I’ve seen thrown, literally, into the garbage can when the recycling bin is right there! That product could be made into something else and reused, but now it will sit in a landfill and take 450 years to biodegrade. We have got to start making a change!

Let’s start off with why this is a problem. We’ve all been told that we should recycle, but why? To start off, landfills, where all this trash goes, produces air and ground water pollution. As the products inside biodegrade, they release over 10 toxic gases, the most serious of which is methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas, being held in the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. Uh oh. There are hundreds of active landfills in America, just taking up space and polluting the environment. We can easily decrease the amount of pollution and space being taken up if we begin to recycle more! Instead of having these products sit in a landfill until they biodegrade, possible taking hundreds of years, we can recycle them into new things! A glass container can go from a recycling bin to a store shelf in as few as 30 days, how amazing is that?

To fix this problem, we can start with knowing what goes where. At GP and your own homes, aluminum cans, steel and tin cans, plastic bottles without wrappers and caps, cardboard and paper, glass products, aluminum foil and paper lunch bags are all recyclable and can be recreated into another product. Even the milk cartons can be recycled, just make sure they are empty and as clean as possible. If there is any food inside the recycle bin, our janitor, Tom, has to throw the whole bin away.

To start and continue making the world a cleaner place, we must recycle. To make this more accessible and easy, we should get more recycling bins in the lunchroom and possibly a rinsing station, if that’s possible, to make sure everything is clean.

Please, do your part to help us make the world a better and happier place to be.