The Essential Guide to Recycling

This recycling guide aims to inform you what you can recycle, how you can recycle it and why you should try to recycle it. We are presently struggling a little to drag ourselves away from being a throwaway society so the advice here is aimed at helping us all to be a little less wasteful. Ideally we should all try and recycle as much as we can, but this may not always be feasible, however, this recycling guide will hopefully show some of the easiest recycling methods.

Why is it important to recycle?

There are many reasons.

1. It will reduce waste. Everything we throw away has to be put somewhere. These days we buy, use and throw away so many popular electronic consumer goods that our waste dumps are being filled up at unsustainable rates. We cannot keep dumping our rubbish in waste tips (and nobody really wants a new waste tip near to their home either). We have to look at alternatives. Recycling as much as we can will improve our environments because it will reduce the load on the waste dumps and reduce the pollution caused by these dumps.
2. Recycling those things we no longer want will also help us to manage our natural resources better. All those electronic consumer goods for example require the use of valuable materials to make them. Many of these materials are recoverable if we recycle those items rather than throw them away. There are many ways we can recycle such things and this blog will detail some of the easiest ways.
3. It is arguable that it is morally right to recycle rather than throw away if such an option is possible. If we live in a privileged society we can sometimes unwittingly take for granted things that other societies can only dream of having access to. If we were to recycle these things once we move on to newer models, they could be reused in such societies.
4. Many products require the use of vast amounts of energy to make them. This energy is often supplied by fossil fuels, which as you probably know are deemed to be responsible for global warming and subsequent climate change. By recycling we can often significantly reduce the amount of energy used in making products from scratch and therefore help reduce those damaging carbon dioxide emissions which cause global warming.
5. In relation to points 1 and 4. Rubbish dumps emit harmful methane once the waste starts to decompose. Methane is also said to be a powerful gas that can cause global warming. Thus by recycling we can reduce not only the greenhouse gases from the beginning of the process (when the item is made) but also at then end of the process (when the item is thrown away).

Just a few of the main reasons to recycle what we can.

The rest of this blog is going to be devoted to giving you ideas about what you can recycle, how to recycle and sometimes further reasons for doing so. I hope it is useful to you.