Figure 1. Excavator Crushes Trash (Ferguson, 2012)
This pile would be much smaller if the recyclable plastic in it was put to work.

Research

Recycling is a relatively simple way to reduce waste production. It not only keeps materials such as plastics out of landfills, but creates a large supply of materials for use. There is only so much petrolium on Earth, in effect, only so much plastic we can create. This finite and rapidly dwindling resource is destroyed when it is used for fuel but many "waste" plastics that have served their purposes in their current forms are still perfectly good as raw materials. They can be melted down and used to create new products making the production of new plastics far less necessary. Recycling plastic is also much cheaper than the full process of synthesizing new plastic. It seems logical then that governments and businesses would be eagerly taking advantage of already existant plastics to create new products. Instead, 86 percent of discarded plastic in the United States ends up in a landfill (Cho, 2012). To put that another way, in 2010 America had a 34% recycling rate, producing 250 million tons of waste in the year and recycling or composting only 85 million tons of it (EPA, 2010).

Plastics can never truly decompose. Over time they simply break into increasingly smaller pieces until they form microplastics, tiny beads of plastic that often end up in the oceans. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up almost entirely of microplastics which kill microorganisms by blocking sunlight and poisoning larger organisms when they ingest the plastic (National Geographic). Plastic that makes it into the environment, whether placed in landfills or left somewhere in nature, will never go away. Plastic's lack of degridation could be used to our advangage though. Since many types of plastic can be reused, we already have a huge supply of plastic on hand, it just needs to be processed. This would prevent both more plastic from getting into the environment and wasting patrolium and other resources on producing even more plastic.



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Ferguson, Brian. Excavator Crushes Trash at the Anchorage Landfill, 2012.