Recycling:The Technology of Conserving :: Environmental Environment

RecyclingThe Technology of ConservingI. America Thinks TrashOver the foregone two decades, the U.S. Public has embraced a remarkable hobby recycling. The awareness of threatening environmental issues and recycling programs have been growing parallel to each other. Despite massive and compelling evidence against recycling, the American public has continued to practice daily rituals of sorting out items from their own trash. After reading the arguments posed by the anti-recyclers, making sure to acknowledge the truth and disregard over generalizations and flaws, a prevailing question arises Is recycling necessary with our technological advances? II. The History of GarbagePopulation when uncurbed increases in a geometrical ration. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. -Thomas Roberto Malthus (1798) The world has inevitable had its share of sighting into the future. An energy crisis in the middle of the 19th ascorbic acid was caused by the dwindling supply of whales. In 1905, President Roosevelt announced a timber famine. In 1929, the United States was proclaimed to have a pure seven year supply of petroleum left. It was also predicted by several ecologists, including Paul Ehrlich, one of the worlds better-known scientists and author of The Population conk out, that in the 1970s or 80s the world would undergo a terrible famine and eventually starve to death. Not only did the astray fear popular sightings not occur, but things were actually getting less scarce as population grew. 8Did we get lucky? Yes and No. Yes because the scarcity oblige prices to increase and forced creative and ingenious minds to create new resources. No because new uses for resources existed, we just had not discovered them. Furthermore, luck did not take parcel out of the problem, hard work towards solutions did. Are we running out? Fossil fuels and most minerals are more abundant than in the past--that is, they are more readily functional and cheaper than they used to be. Most resources are so plentiful that they will last for centuries (6). Resources are abundantly available, but like anything else in this world, if we abuse, we will have ill-starred consequences. Maybe not complete extinction or mass starvation, but definitely unwanted problems which could have been prevented. So, we might not run out of crude and one sighs with content. However, it is not necessarily a good thing. More oil means more pollution. III. Two-Faced TrashHumanitys destiny is debated by two opposing views in the recycling world. The ecologist and the economist.