Recycling is deceptive, huge waste of time and resources

You know that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you drop your used paper, plastics and other recyclable materials into the big blue bins around campus. We were trained as little children to be sure to put our paper and plastics in said blue bins and we are patted on the back and praised for “living green.” What if I if I said that all that sorting your trash was a waste of your time?

People want to believe that they are doing the right thing when they recycle. However, these blue recycle bins represent a false promise that we are saving the Earth when we use them to dispose of our used paper, bottles and cans. The supposed benefits of recycling are supposed to be based on the concept that recycling things like plastic results in less carbon being released into the atmosphere, according to an article titled the “Reign of Recycling” published in The New York Times. However, evidence shows that the benefits are slim to none in terms of carbon emissions, based on this article by John Tierney:

“To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000.”

What they don’t tell us in our school, and amongst every other school in the AISD school district, is that as they plop these obnoxious bins in our rooms, that resemble a container full of false promises that we are saving the Earth and that we are seemingly becoming better people as we throw our graded papers and plastic wrap in the recycle bin.