Recycling takes up too much time and effort!

OK, it is possibly easier not to recycle and throw all your rubbish into one bag than to separate it out into four differently coloured ones.

Yes, having to wash out and dry those plastic bottles and tin cans is not particularly convenient when there are possibly a hundred and one better things you could be doing with those valuable seconds of your time.

Maybe too you don't produce much household rubbish compared to that wasteful neighbour of yours who always seems to produce enough for the whole street on his own, so why bother doing your little bit when he clearly isn't doing his?

You know, there are so many tiny excuses we could all use to avoid the hassle of recycling all of those things that could be recycled if we thought about it for a few minutes, but the reasons for recycling are so compelling, and it is something that every one of us can do to make a massive overall contribution to reducing household wast, that these pale into insignificance to the consequences of not recycling.

The benefits go far and beyond reducing the amount of waste that is dumped in landfill sites or in the sea. We are in the 21st century now and are supposedly a more enlightened race, so lets prove it. We need to clean up our act, literally, and it is not difficult for each one of us to do. Let me just highlight, again, the immense benfits you will be contributing too just by taking a few moments of your day to recycle as much of your rubbish as you can rather than just throwing it away.

• You will help to reduce landfill volumes and not leave a dirty legacy for future generations (our children and their children) to have to clean up.
• Reduced landfill means reduced methane emissions from it. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas (that could exacerbate global warming) and we don't that at the moment as we have enough problems with carbon dioxide.
• By recycling materials you will be helping to save valuable, finite, natural resources, such as aluminium. Finite means they will run out. If they are buried in landfill, it will not be an easy nor pleasant process to extract them from that.
• By recycling plastic you are ensuring that we don't have an Earth contaminated with a material that endures for lengthy periods of time and biodegrades at a painfully slow rate, if at all.
• Recycling will save energy as less new material will have to be made/extracted from the Earth. Saving energy will conserve the valuable natural resources used to produce it. Plus this will have the positive knock-on effect of reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

So you see, those tiny excuses at the beginning of this blog really mean nothing compared to what wont happen if we don't recycle. Recycling may be a bit inconvenient sometimes, but it is such a simple and easy thing to do, that takes very little time, and the benefits of doing so are really incredible when you look at them a little more closely.

Feel good about recycling and convince that neighbour of yours to do it too!