What Are the Positive Effects of Recycling?

While about 94% of Americans say that recycling should be a priority, in reality, the recycling rate in the United States is only at 34.7%.

The rate of recycling should really be higher, especially considering some of the benefits that come out of recycling.

If you aren’t someone who recycles on a regular basis, you might be wondering, “What are the positive effects of recycling?” Keep reading to discover some of the most important ones.

Helps Regulate Oxygen Levels in Environment

You probably don’t put much thought into the paper that you come into contact with every day. To make the paper, someone had to cut down a tree.

However, trees are incredibly important in regulating the amount of oxygen that’s in our air. Trees can make hundreds of pounds of oxygen, and when we cut them down for paper, we’re taking away some of the world’s natural regulation.

With global warming getting worse, we need these trees even more than usual. We can help to save this by recycling paper so that way we don’t have to cut down any more trees and sacrifice the oxygen regulators.

Reduce Landfills

Every time you throw something away, it just goes right into a landfill somewhere. After a while, the garbage will start to pile up and make it difficult for our environment. With more and more people, the landfills will become exponentially bigger, and eventually, we’ll run out of room for the trash.

Landfills can also be damaging to the environment by taking away natural beauty in the world. It can also cause air pollution or health problems for those who live close to that.

However, if we start recycling more products, we can make these landmasses significantly smaller.

Some things you can’t even throw away, like electronics. They can be a safety hazard in a landfill, but you can recycle electronics safely.

Save Natural Resources

One of the main benefits of recycling is that it can save the natural resources that earth gave us. These resources won’t last forever, so we need to find ways to be able to reuse them.

For example, if we start recycling all of our plastic, we can reuse it so that we don’t have to make more of it. Plastic is made out of fossil fuel hydrocarbons, and these won’t last forever.

We can also recycle metal, which will reduce mining and taking more of the metal that we find on the earth. It’s important to start recycling now before we actually do run out of these resources.

Lastly, you can also recycle glass. Glass is made from sand, and some sand supplies are actually getting dangerously low. Like everything else, the sand helps to play a part in our ecosystem, so it’s important to conserve as much of it as possible if we can.

Save Energy

Recycling does take some energy to reconvert the materials, but it doesn’t take as much energy as it does to burn waste in the landfill. It would take much more energy to burn the recyclables than to just convert them back into something useful.

It will also take more energy to create the products from scratch rather than from using recycled materials.

Conserve Nature for Wildlife

With recycling, we won’t need to use up as much land to harvest and grow all of the materials that we need. This means that there will be more space leftover to give back to wildlife.

Aside from that, our waste could potentially get into their habitat and harm them. For example, plastic takes a long time to break down, but there are so many pieces of plastic floating in the ocean, hurting the marine life that lives there.

Instead of just throwing your water bottle away, you can recycle it to have it be reused and to also help keep the habitats of other animals clean.

Reduces Climate Change

Recycling is also helpful because it can decrease the harmful effects we have on global warming.

Landfills also warm up the planet as well. Landfills help to produce carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases. With these elements in the atmosphere, it destroys the earth and lowers the number of years the earth will be able to go on like this.

It may not seem like a huge effect right now, but after years of everyone recycling and contributing, it will add up and help the environment.

Creates Jobs

Lastly, recycling also helps to create jobs.

You might think that recycling is just a small inconvenience for you, but you could be helping someone to keep their job and put food on the table.

Recycling is a huge industry, and hundreds of people spend their time going through recyclables and organizing it all.

Yes, throwing your trash away helps other people stay employed as well, but there are more jobs created with recycling. Besides, not everything can be recycled, so some people will still need to be employed to take care of your trash.

Discover More to Learn What Are the Positive Effects of Recycling?

Hopefully, this answers your question of, “What are the positive effects of recycling?”

There are plenty of more positive effects and other things that you can do to help preserve our planet. To find out how to do your part, make sure that you explore our website.

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