You Can Recycle

By Rachael Wong

The world today has too much trash and it is taking up precious land that could be used for so many other plans. Do we remember what we’ve learnt in school when the teacher taught us the topic of recycling and what we can do?

I remember a particular English lesson when the teacher took us the television room and showed us a documentary. It started of with a boy living in an area where there are buildings everywhere and no trees. The city is very small and very congested with tall buildings everywhere. There are loud noises everywhere from cars, factories and the smell in that area is not pleasant. Turns out, there is a huge rubbish wasteland next to the boy’s neighbourhood. The next part of the documentary tells us that if we don’t recycle, that is what will happen to our environment many years later.

Other students must have learnt something about recycling sometime in school. But how often to we practice it? Has it become a culture for us to recycle? Perhaps is has not. We may rationalize by saying not everything can be recycled but have we done our part in trying? There are, in fact, many materials that can be easily recycled such as these:

• Metals--such as aluminum, steel, and tin. All of these metals must be mined from the ground, which can damage the local landscape and create water and air pollution. Most metals can be melted down and recycled again and again. This saves huge amounts of energy.
• Glass--is made largely from sand, and there is hardly a shortage of that in the world. However, turning the sand into glass takes a large amount of energy. Much less energy (and much less sand) is used when glass is melted down and made into new bottles and jars. Every ton of crushed waste glass used saved the equivalent of about 30 gallons of oil.
• Paper--is made from trees, of course, and cutting down trees can cause environmental problemsIt takes at least 25 years for a tree to grow tall enough to be made into paper--which we may use and throw away in a matter of minutes! Turning trees into paper also uses tremendous amounts of energy and water and causes a great deal of air and water pollution.
• Plastics--are made from chemicals, many of which are made of fossil fuels such as oil. Because the technology has not been perfected, very little plastic is being recycled. Recycling plastic is different from recycling glass, aluminum, and paper. While you can turn used paper into new paper, and turn an aluminum can or glass bottle into another can or bottle, you cannot turn a plastic hamburger container into another container. At best, the container can be made into something different--a flowerpot, for example, or a videocassette box--so there are limits to the usefulness of recycling plastic.
• Other materials--this includes a variety of products that we can use every day, such as batteries (including automobile batteries), clothing, oil, tires, and yard wastes. Check out the rest of this site for specific suggestions on how to recycle some of these things.

Source: http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/4990/toomuchtrash.html

Why not try recycling? In our university, there are in fact some places you can find the recycling bins where we separate our rubbish into the different components and the collectors will take them to the factories to recycle. In fact, you can find one at the Arts Faculty and the Bangunan Siswarama. It doesn’t take much effort to start recycling. We can all begin with that conscience telling us that we NEED to recycle for our children in the future.

There are some tips to keep in mind. Refuse to buy what is not fully recyclable or are wasteful. Reuse what you can and don’t throw away things unnecessarily. Keep sorting out your waste for recycling purposes. You can also start a recycling campaign or project like the ones they have in the different colleges and the one recently organized by the Environmental Engineering students of UM.

Start by remembering the three Rs. No, it’s not Reading, Writing and ARithmatic but Reduce, Reuse and Recycle!