Old Cell Phone, New Cell Phone

When the first cell phones came into existence, they were few in number and it would have been difficult to imagine just how commonplace they would become. These days, even people who had sworn never to buy a cell phone will have one – for sending text messages or even just for emergencies. What no-one foresaw was that most people would buy a new cell phone on average once a year – and in some cases, more frequently.

The result of this is that all of a sudden there are people who have several phones and no practical use for any more than a couple of them. it is not uncommon for people to just throw the old phones away – but this is not a good idea. A cell phone is made up of several parts – a plastic fascia, an LCD screen, a battery and more. These will take forever to decompose – and it would be a much better idea to take part in one of the many programs which take your old cell off you (sometimes in return for cash) and set about re-tooling it for a life as someone else’s phone.

This is a good alternative to the tendency that so many of us have, to just throw something away when we are done with it. Some phone recycling programs are done for charity, and allow people who could not otherwise afford a cell phone to have one, allowing them to have something which, as more and more of us are realizing, is often a necessity.

Recycling You Can Do Yourself

Recycling is encompassed in most people’s minds as the trip to the recycling bins at the end of their garden, at a municipal tip or in another public place. One way or another, the process of recycling is considered to take time and effort, and this is many people’s reason for not doing it. However, there is plenty you can do to recycle that does not take any more effort than just continuing to do what you are doing anyway. Here are a few examples.

Re-using plastic bags: Instead of throwing plastic bags in the trash when they have been used to transport goods home, they can be kept and used for a variety of purposes – from carrying personal belongings around, to storage around the house. The same thing can be done with cardboard boxes and plastic food containers and bottles.
Composting: Many items, when they have served their useful purpose around the home, can be added to a compost heap which can be used to fertilize a garden. Cardboard and newspaper, although they decompose slowly, will decompose.
Passing It On: You may find that you have no more use for household furnishings or clothes, etcetera. There are, however, several alternatives to just throwing them out. Second-hand stores, and the phenomenon of “free-cycling”, where people with old equipment that they no longer need hand it on to people who can use it, are excellent alternatives.

The above are just some examples of how you can make further use from things that you have judged to have come to the end of their usefulness.

Why Should I Recycle Plastics?

Imagine your weekly grocery shop. Put yourself in the place where you do that shop and mentally walk around the store. Now, as you are doing this, think of all of the items you pick up that are either made from or stored in plastic. When you consider the amount of plastic that is used by domestic and industrial customers in the course of a year, it adds up to a lot. Soda bottles and yogurt pots. Trash bags and detergent bottles. Just about anything you might ever buy for a baby – all of it is either made from or packaged in plastic.

Sooner or later, the containers or the items will become useless and need to be disposed of. In most cases, sooner – and as a result, the average household throws out enough plastic to make up about 12% of all the waste disposed of in the course of a year. That is a truly staggering amount.

If you recycle plastic instead of simply dumping it, it is not just a matter of stopping the plastic from entering landfill and keeping it from degrading the environment. An interesting statistic is that the production of new plastic accounts for 4% of the energy consumed in the United States in the course of a year – which is a lot of energy. If, however, plastic is simply recycled, the amount of energy required is considerably less.

All of this energy costs money to produce, and uses up valuable natural and expensive manufactured resources. Instead of this, why not just recycle? It doesn’t cost you anything and it makes life easier on everyone.

Why Recycling Is Important

Although there is a lot of cynicism directed against the environmentalist movement, this does not stop an awful lot of people from recycling. You don’t need to be an environmentalist to care about recycling, after all. Although it is one of the major green issues, recycling is about a lot more than just keeping the world clean and thriving. Considering how much garbage we create and throw out in this day and age, recycling is simply a sane response to a problem that is at risk of going insane.

When we finish with plastic or glass bottles, food containers, newspapers and magazines, it is really no effort to put them separately from the rest of our garbage and dispose of them in the relevant recycling bin. For those who wonder why they should bother, it is worth considering that when garbage is disposed of, it gets placed into a landfill. When in landfills, garbage is compacted down into as small a space as possible – the intention is that it will biodegrade – but this takes a long time. In the case of plastic bottles, it can take hundreds of years.

Imagine how many plastic bottles we will use over the course of a year alone. Without recycling, this will add up to enough to fill most of the world’s landfills in one fell swoop. You don’t need to be an environmentalist to see why recycling them instead of just throwing them away makes sense. It’s simply a case of keeping the world from becoming inhabitable.

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