Carbon Emissions | October 09, 2007 |
Is Recycling Enough?
Seem a little trivial? Surely there's much more we can do to prevent global warming than just recycle? Perhaps we need to recycle our educational efforts.
These small steps are a good first step and a relatively easy way to make people aware of global warming and encourage changes. But are they enough? A thoughtful article in The Guardian discusses how little impact these activities actually have.
Compare recycling to flying less, or using alternative energies so we can rely less on coal, or convincing big businesses and corporations to cut back emissions.
Fortunately, businesses are going greener by the day, with big stores like REI, Wal-Mart and Office Depot leading the way.
However, according to a report from the Carbon Disclosure Project, only 38 percent of the companies that responded to a recent survey have put in place emissions reduction schemes with targets. This has resulted in many groups uniting in the United Kingdom to push for standardized reporting levels of carbon dioxide emissions for businesses.
Still, this report follows one released last month that said of the world's 500 largest corporations, 76 percent of respondents had put emissions reduction schemes in place, compared to 48 percent last year.
So the business of making business green is improving. And we should certainly continue to recycle. But do we also need to try to educate the masses that more is needed?
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Comments By Readers
I think the underlying question in your argument should be, "how can we reduce global warming?", instead of, "Are we too focused on recycling to reduce global warming?".
Recycling is obviously a way to reduce global emissions. The only problem with recycling in the USA is the way that the program is poorly organized. Step outside of our borders (or perhaps your bubble), and you will quickly notice how every apartment building, house, office building, and street corner has a 3-5 different containers designed for different recyclable items. This enables people to not only only recycle more types of items but also a greater quantity.
The problem is not our focus on recycling. If the program was actually designed to be effective, we would have a better respect for it. The reality is that most homeowners in suburbia actually have to pay for a small recycling bin, which gets picked up once a month.
I think that since America is the world's leading contributor to global warming, we should probably start to analyze how other countries are limiting emissions, and bring those initiatives and programs to the USA.
"Not flying as much" is just not even a logical option. People have to fly for work; we live in a global economy and not everything can be done over the internet. We need to cut emissions in another way. Transportation in our country is a huge concern/dilemma. Again, why don't we look outside of our bubble, and realize that every other country provides public transportation; whether bus, subway, street car, or train. In our giant nation, we have 5-10 cities where public transportation is actually feasible for all citizens, if that.
We should recycle. But before we even think about recycling, we should reduce our overall consumption in the first place! Too much energy and too many resources are used to create unnecessary packaging, disposable products, and replacements for last year's styles. If we could reform our thinking about our purchases, starting with why we think we need so many new things to begin with, we'd actually have less need to recycle and probably be a lot happier.
On my site, http://www.fakeplasticfish.com, I wrestle with these issues, trying to find alternatives to plastic but also ways cut consumption and the need to own in general.
Recycling is better than not recycling. But it's certainly not a cure-all.
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