Are You Too Lazy to Recycle?

Recycling isn’t the answer to our problems.  We should be focused on using less in the first place but I’ll rant talk about that in an upcoming post.  Recycling is necessary to reclaim valuable resources and we should recycle everything we possibly can.  Many valuable resources are finite and when they are used up or buried in a hole, there isn’t going to be any more of said valuable resource.  I’ve always recycled but in the past, I wasn’t a dedicated recycler. I would toss paper in the trash if I felt too lazy to put it in the recycling.  If I ate a yogurt at my desk and didn’t feel like rinsing it out, I would put it in the trash can at my desk instead of walking the 10 feet to the office kitchen to rinse it out and put it in the right place.  I’ve prepared meals that have called for cream of chicken soup or kidney beans and it was too much work to rinse out the cans to put them in recycling so I would put them in the trash. Same thing with shampoo or conditioner bottles, lotion bottles, laundry detergent containers, etc.  I look back at my lackluster commitment to recycling and knowing what I know now, it makes me feel terrible. It’s easy to be lazy or not care when our waste goes into a trash can at the end of our driveway once a week and disappears from our sight and mind. In reality, it is going somewhere for a long time.  Many things never degrade in a landfill due to the anaerobic environment and other things just take a very long time. My family is now quite diligent in our recycling because we now understand the bigger impact. The next time you feel too lazy to recycle properly, think about how many years (if ever) it takes for things to degrade.

Plastic Bag: 10-100+ years

Plastic Bottle: 450+ years

Other Plastic Items: 1000+ years

Tin Can: 50 years

Aluminum Can: 80-200 years

Glass: 1 million+ years

Batteries: 100+ years

Styrofoam: never