How Does Recycling Help the Environment?
Recycling is great, and we all know it. But, how does recycling help the environment? Here are the essential benefits of recycling.
Why is recycling important? What are the benefits of recycling?
We’ve all heard of the Three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
As a slogan, it’s about perfect—it is short, can’t be misunderstood, and has the pleasant ring of alliteration.
To reduce is to cut down on what is produced and consumed.
To reuse is to find ways to repurpose items that otherwise are designed to be discarded.
To recycle is to submit items to be broken down into base materials and converted into future products.
Though this catchy phrase makes an easy-to-live-by rule, it only makes us question further. So, in this guide, we’ll look at ways recycling helps the environment. Shortly after, we’ll discuss common materials you can separate and recycle, as well as why those materials are necessary to recycle.
Let’s jump right in!
How Does Recycling Help the Environment?
Recycling is one of the best ways to fight climate change.
How?
Here are a few ways recycling helps the environment and fight climate change:
1. Recycling Conserves Resources
When we recycle plastic, we reduce the need for more plastic to be manufactured. By recycling paper, we do our part to lessen deforestation and save trees from being cut down. Separating cans and other metals helps to cut down on damaging mining and our growing need for raw materials.
2. Recycling Saves Energy
It takes much more energy to create industrial-grade materials from scratch than it does just to reform old materials and reuse them. For example, it is estimated that “recycling aluminum saves 90% to 95% of the energy needed to make aluminum from bauxite ore.” Recycling saves energy because recycled materials don’t require factories to expend so much greenhouse gas emissions as they would if they had created the same item again from scratch using raw materials.
3. Recycling Protects the Environment
When we cut down on the number of new materials and natural resources we need to extract from the earth, whether through farming, mining, logging, etc., we protect vulnerable ecosystems and wildlife from harm or eradication and allow them to exist for generations to come. Recycling materials emit way less greenhouse gases into the environment than primary production.
4. Recycling Slows the Spread of Landfills
The designated landfill in Buterere of Bujumbura city is full of solid waste and emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as it slowly decomposes. This doesn’t account for the future landfills that’ll have to be created when the active landfills become landfilled.
5. Recycling Creates Jobs
That’s right: believe it or not, one of the benefits of recycling is that it actually helps create jobs!
6. Recycling Supports the SDGs
Our future and the future of all generations after us depend on sustainable production and consumption. As such, recycling is one of the best ways to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
