How Green Is This Really?
People have been recycling objects and materials for thousands of years.
Driven by environmental concerns, governments in most developed nations have taken a more organised and coordinated approach to public recycling programs over the past 30 years. At various times there has been some controversy about the environmental benefits of recycling. There are valid points made on all sides of the various arguments, but the general consensus of people who have explored this in depth is that recycling is worth doing, especially if you do it locally, and that we need to start changing our culture to one where we only produce things that can easily be reused recycled.
News Bites
Every year or two there seems to be a story in the paper or on a current affairs program claiming that a recycling program is not working somewhere and material is being dumped in landfill instead. This can encourage people to think cynically about whether recycling is really worthwhile. But it shouldn’t – the very fact that the story is reported at all shows that recycling normally does work just about all the time. There are some occasions where a load of recyclables cannot be used economically but these are very rare – in fact most of the time the problem is the opposite – recyclers cannot get enough recyclables to meet their capacity.
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