Undergraduate / (MaCaulay Honors essay) - Discussion of a Risk- Pollution & Recycling [4]

Discuss some issue of local, national, or international concern and its importance to you. (500 words or less)

(MaCaulay Honors essay).

Next time the water in your plastic bottle flows from the brim of the bottle to the inside of your mouth, take some time, and think about this bottle. Do you know what this bottle is doing to the earth? Though this bottle may be small, the consequences that this object has are very detrimental to the earth.

We as humans have depleted the earth of many of its resources, and have only replaced it with non-degradable materials. Plastic, which is one of the most prevalent materials used to store and transfer items, is probably one of the worst inventions for the earth. Because this material is made to be very sturdy, it makes the product just as hard to naturally degrade. An average plastic bottle can take up to 450 to 1000 years to fully decompose, but this bottle must be sitting in fresh air with no other trash surrounding it. Take our current dilemma, with landfills full of plastic bottles. These bottles will NOT decompose at all, because the conditions do not serve decomposing settings; everything is compacted with one another, leaving no room for items to dissolve naturally. These bottles are essentially barnacles clinging on the ground of the earth, and taking up potential room.

We, as a planet, must increase the process of recycling. Though this process is somewhat expensive, and needs a good amount of labor, the results outweigh the process. If we continue to fill the world with any plastic item, we will eventually run out of space to hold such raunchy products. Recycling of plastic items allows these baleful items allow the life span to be put to good use; instead of creating "new" plastic, we can just recycle older plastic, and slowly unburden the earth of our products. In addition, recycling can also create more jobs for people. In a time of economic decline, if we provide more jobs, we can manage the flow of money, and thus, slowly augment the economy to higher levels.

Recycling is important to me, and to my generation. My generation of adolescence is taking the world for granted, and is acting somewhat selfish; we only care about our pleasures of new plastic, and being somewhat lethargic by not recycling. Though we are making our lives more enjoyable, we are only leaving the grievance to our predecessors; they will have to face this problem in a bigger scale. We must inaugurate recycling, or our planet will overflow in plastic.