Waste and Recycling

Waste and Recycling book cover — Rebecca Hunter

Waste and Recycling — page 1 — A Wasteful World I magine what would happen if nobody took your garbage away What would it be like if day after day week after week your trash piled up in your house and front yard Pretty soon you would be wading through plastic bottles and paper bags and rotting food It would look terrible and the smell would be worse If we don’t control the amount of waste we throw away this situation might actually happen We live in a very wasteful world Almost everything we do creates waste Everything we buy everything we eat and everything we use all produces waste that has to be disposed of in some way As the population of the world grows the amount of garbage produced increases too The problem is not just that our society produces more waste today than ever before but it is also doing it at a greater rate Today we produce three times as much waste as we did in the 1960s A strike by garbage removal workers in Leeds England in October 2009 shows what city streets look like after just a few weeks when refuse piles up (cid:23)

Waste and Recycling — page 2 — The large volumes of garbage we make creates not just a disposal problem but is also a huge waste of natural resources Unless things can be reused or recycled everything we throw away has to be produced again out of new materials More trees have to be cut down to make paper more oil has to be refined to make plastic Prevention of waste is a better solution than even the best way of disposing of it Disposal of garbage has become critical throughout the world Where does the garbage come from How do we get rid of it How can we reduce the amount of it Finding ways to deal with the garbage we produce is one of the major problems facing the world today A large proportion of our garbage is disposed of in landfill sites But landfill is an ugly polluting and environmentally unfriendly way to dispose of waste

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