Can We say no to Recycling
Lately the earth's capacity to tolerate exploitation and absorb solid wastes disposal has diminished, due to excess trashing. People dispose lots of stuff, and simply do not care. Therefore scientists found out a way to reuse things and that process was called "recycling". This new approach seemed quite successful at the beginning, until its true identity appeared. Recycling first started as man's best friend, people were intrigued by this new phenomena. What could be better than using things that were already used. Recycling has been very useful especially that man is constantly consuming, burning up, wearing out, replacing and disposing at an alarming rate.(Durning 1992). However, unfortunately recycling has proven that it is quite costly. Although recycling of wastes material solves the problem of garbage disposal at landfills, and saves resources, it does nevertheless entail large hidden costs in collecting, sorting and manufacturing; therefore, it is necessary for the go!vernment to overcome such problems of recycling to be worth while and for manufacturers and consumers to consume less. Recycling has proven its efficiency in solving the problem of garbage disposal at landfills1. By the accu
As for the sorting process it entails lots of man power and tools, both of which are very expensive. The material cannot simply be all fed into one big machine and then "boom" we have recycled material. No, every kind of material must be put alone then fed into big recycling machines. This process of separation or sorting costs money. Manufacturers have to hire labourers to sort out glass from aluminium from cardboard from tin and so on. According to Consumer Reports, the sorting equipment and the man power involved in the process is a big investment (1994). It is important to know that this process of collecting and sorting is particularly expensive in developed countries where sophisticated tools are used where man power is rather limited and expensive. However, in developing countries like Egypt, the process of collecting and sorting are rather primitive and is carried out by the "Zabaleen " or a second-hand car. This makes it less expensive than developed countries. Manufacturing and marketing is the second phase in this process. In order to build the factories that do the recycling operation, the most important thing we must have is the capital. Building these factories is quite expensive plus it takes time because the latest technology must be applied in there. According to The Consumers Report, when garbage is sorted it is sent to factories to be put in industry. These factories usually designed for producing from raw material, need "retooling" so as to use recycled material; which is very expensive. For example Union Carbide Inc., one of the nations major supplies of plastic, had to spend 10 million dollars on building a factory that would recycle plastic bottles it had produced (1994). Therefore to retool a factory to make it compatible with the demands of recycling means machines in an old factory must be replaced with new ones and this is costly. For some reason all the machinery in a recycling firm tend to ware out so fast, it is ! mulation of garbage throughout the years, space available for garbage has largely diminished. In the states for example almost 67% of their waste stream ends up in landfills.(Scott 25). This has in fact increased the price of disposal. As Kimball stated "tipping fees" at landfills, is so often prohibitive(3), and some cannot find landfills to dump their garbage. It can cost up to $158 to pick a ton of garbage and dispose it.(Consumer Reports 1994). Beside, these landfills pollute their surroundings area with lots of hazardous materials and contaminate underground water. To discover the contamination of the underground water it would be 12 yeas after the poisons-benzene; formaldehyde; mercury; and BCEE- have actually contaminated the land, and had sunk 24 feet into the ground contaminating about 50 million gallons of underground water.(Dahir 94). Besides these lands could b! This rapid leap in our lives have led us to create recycling and hopefully it will lead us to look for a way to better plan it. Better planing for recycling will help prevent the problems faced now by recycling. If it could be made that it satisfies the needed conditions previously mentioned, to be cost-efficient, not time consuming, and a better quality of products, this would be like a dream come true. Recycling should be cost-efficient because what all nations are facing are massive economical problems. Financing these programs is one hell of a job and if it has to be done anyway, then we should at least look for ways to make it cost efficient. People should learn to use and reuse, rather than use and dispose. If we can use things more than once and co
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Approximate Word count = 2426
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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