Do you yearn for World Peace? It may seem distant from recycling bottles but keep it in mind, it will soon have its importance.
Do you recycle then? Do you sort out the containers and various other wrappers or even standard products ( old metal such as spoons, forks, etc ) that have outlived their use and take them to the curb in an appropriate bin or yet bring them to a recycling collection box or center around your neighbourhood? Depending on where you live, one of these options is certainly available. In fact, if you live in a poorer country than average, it is almost certain that you do recycle since the smaller of scraps is worth something, money that you likely need to live. But in richer lands, it depends on both where you live and how environment conscious you are.
At my new place for instance, in a relatively good recycling town, the building itself does not have a blue bin for the purpose. Being relatively environment conscious myself, thank you very much, I enquired around as to what I could do to solve my dilemma. I eventually got a proper answer which consists of getting a small portable blue tub destined and identified for the job and will now place it on the other side of the street by the private houses on recycling mornings. But before I did find about that, the first neighbors that I asked were puzzled. There is no recycling bin so they don,t recycle and what would the problem be with that? So that I had to repeat this simple and poetic explanation over and over again : to avoid future unnecessary wars!
The four more common recyclable products are paper ( cardboard, etc ) used in many packages and that is difficult to reuse, glass which is easily melted and reused as are also light metals such as aluminum ( soft drinks and beer cans ) or even the alloys or steel of food cans and … plastics. Trees grow everywhere. Glass, made from sand, is not much rarer and if there are 4 huge glass conglomerates ( 2 Japanese, and one each French and American ), there are plants pretty much everywhere. Aluminum is the most abundant metal on the Earth at least at or near surface level ( in the crust ). Plastic however …
Plastics, to the exclusion of some modern applications that have turned to bio-degradable plastics and use starch and other such vegetable based ingredients ( but often still through their process ), are made out of petroleum. And that is not available everywhere; you have to import it from all sorts of foreign lands, the most resourceful of which are in the Middle-East ( except Venezuela ) or not so friendly ( like Russia ) and sometimes both. Apart from Canada, the West hunts for oil with a passion. With big guns quite often.
Multiple examples of “oil wars” could be given but we’ll go with the latest one since it’s consequences are in the news these days. After the September 9 2001 attacks, the American Administration of the time started an unnecessary war in Iraq. Some will surmise that vengeance or stupidity were the actual motives but the fact that there remain a force of American “contractors” at work watching the petroleum installations today as the government crumbles under the assault of the ISIS/ISIL rebels is proof enough that that resource was part of the affair since all other troops have left? When possible, alliances are the preferred way of guaranteeing access to oil but they almost always include lending help by stationing troops or selling military equipment at preferential rates. In both cases there is a cost albeit a much greater one when war is deemed the “right choice”.
How does this relate to recycling? Well, every time you recycle one ton of plastics, bleach or water bottle etc, you save 16.3 barrels of oil. Strangely enough because of what is spent in extraction and transport and transformation, one ton of recycled aluminum saves 40 barrels of oil. America alone consumes 1 500 plastic bottles every second. If none were recycled … As far as aluminum goes, a single can saves by being recycled half a gallon of gasoline and 80 billion are sold every year! Do the math : 4o billion gallons of gas saved if they all are recycled?
And then draw your own conclusions : if we all recycled seriously instead of going -“Oh, well!”, raising shoulders and letting it go, how many wars could we save that end up with dictatorship and / or civil wars? Do as you please but I’ll use my small bin, cross the street every week and keep pestering my neighbors not to discard recyclables as I just did with you. If they don’t like it, they can just move or help me sign the petition for a big blue thing by the block because I don’t like wars all that much, especially unnecessary ones.
Tay.
Definitive Lapse of Reason 