Why Recycling Is Worthwhile: A Different Perspective
As a freelance writer, I have been following and writing about recycling for many years. I am actually a big fan of recycling. However, my reasons for supporting it are not what you might think. I look at recycling separate from climate change, sustainability, etc. In fact, you could say that my perspective on the matter is quite different.
I get the fact that recycling is often tied to matters like saving the planet and achieving economic justice. I will not get into those issues because my thoughts on recycling are more practical than idealistic. But again, I see recycling from a completely different perspective. Here is why I think it’s a good idea: it just makes sense.
Waste Is Wasteful
At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, waste is wasteful. By its very nature, waste ends up costing us more in the long run. It doesn’t make sense to throw away something that can be recycled, repurposed, or reused. Throwing perfectly good items in the trash is just foolish. It does not make any sense from a logical perspective.
When I was a kid, we didn’t have access to as many cheap consumer products as we have today. Take something as common as the television. Back in the 1970s, televisions were extremely expensive compared to a typical worker’s annual salary. So if your TV broke, you had it repaired. You did not throw it away and buy a new one.
Things are totally different in the 2020s. TV repair shops are virtually extinct because so few people will fix a broken TV now. And why is that? Because new TVs are relatively cheap compared to their older counterparts. They are cheap enough that most people don’t think twice about throwing an old one away in order to buy a new one. And yet, trashing a broken TV is unnecessarily wasteful.
We Reused and Repurposed
The commercial recycling we know of today was a rarity when I was a kid. We could collect paper and glass and sell it to recyclers for cash, but there was no such thing as plastic recycling. Batteries did not get recycled either. As for common household items we would throw in the trash today, we used and repurpose them 50 years ago.
It was an entirely different mindset back then. When something broke, you fixed it. When you had something that was no longer useful for its original purpose, you found some other way to use it. We didn’t throw away as much because replacing what we threw away wasn’t nearly as convenient or cheap as it is today.
You Just Have to Find a Way to Do It
My past experiences with waste have convinced me that throwing things away unnecessarily just doesn’t make sense. But it does make sense to recycle, reuse, and repurpose. I get why people are quick to throw things away: they don’t know what else to do. But that is the key to this whole thing. Recycling is possible with just about any material. You just need to find a way to do it.
Seraphim Plastics, based in Tennessee, has found a way to recycle industrial plastic for a profit. They join other companies around the country in successfully recycling tons of plastic waste every year. If they can do it, others can too.
We consumers can do it as well. We don’t have to generate so much waste. We do so because we either do not know how to recycle, reuse, and repurpose or we just aren’t interested in doing so. Whether you agree or not, that is my perspective.
