|
|
WE ARE Green
Penn State offers students excellent everyday chances to give back to the environment. Blue bins are located everywhere on campus to recycle paper, bottles, aluminum, and glass. In classrooms, in lobbies of buildings, in the commons, and in dorms—they are impossible to miss. Given this convenience, why do I see people throwing away plastic bottles when they are two steps away from a recycling bin? On my own sorority floor, I often spot bottles in the trash cans. According to behealthyandrelax.com, the average time it takes for plastic to biodegrade is between 20-1000 years. Average time for glass? One to two million years. And those aluminum cans you use every day for your Diet Coke fix? 200-500 years each. Think about that. By the time your children’s children have had great-grandchildren, those bottles and cans you mindlessly threw in the trashcan aren’t done decomposing in the landfills you sent them to. Now do I have you wishing you would have taken those extra steps to place that plastic bottle in the recycling bin? If you don’t recycle at all, start with your bottles and aluminum cans. Many states have programs in which people make deposits on metal cans and plastic bottles and the money isn’t returned until those materials are recycled. I think this would be a great program to start at universities, and it would encourage recycling by means of making it mandatory. If you recycle your soda can from lunch today, it will be reused within 6 weeks. If everyone recycles their Sunday newspaper, half a million trees will be saved. If you recycle like I do, pass this information on to your friends! Encourage them to recycle and make them aware of the consequences of what they are doing. Most people who instinctively throw away recyclable material think that recycling is just another option. They aren’t aware of the amount of time it takes for these materials to decompose, the amount of landfill space it saves to recycle, the amount of energy recycling saves, or the amount of trees and rainforests cut down to become paper products. Don’t say you won’t make a difference. You will. Don’t leave it up to our future leaders to change the way we treat the environment. Everyone should start recycling and reusing now, and stop treating the planet like it is indestructible and will rejuvenate itself to keep the human population flourishing. Instead, the human population will deplete nature’s resources until there is nothing left. Then what? Let’s not allow ourselves to reach that point. We are Penn State, and we are green.
|
