What does your daily routine look like? Do you walk to your workplace or schoolplace? Do you drive short distances when you could have walked? It is very likely that 80% of your daily routine creates pollution to the world you live in. Many people are self-centered, and tend to only care about their own personal problems and nothing that doesn't affect them directly. Pollution is one of those things that no one thinks about but affects everyone in the long run. Pollution is a problem that humans have caused, and we are almost to the point of no return.
We contribute to the Earth’s pollution every day and don’t even think about it. Do you remember the three R's? Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. For as much as we puch recycling only 32% of Americans recycle. The article pollution and health states that “recycling is one of the easiest and simplest ways to save energy and reduce air and water pollution.” Over 94% of the U.S population has recycling available to them. It's crazy to think that 80% of our daily items are recyclable but only 9% of them actually end up in the recycling bin. Although, we can’t put all of the blame on ourselves because energy plants, factories, and airplanes are huge contributors to pollution.
Pollution is a huge problem not only in just the United States, but it affects the whole world. Although cars, chemicals, and power plants make our life easier, they hurt the environment drastically and damage our health and the planets’. By using everyday products like hairspray, driving our cars, and purchasing products that are made in factories we are making things more convenient for us now, but in the long run we end up hurting ourselves and others. You wouldn't think that spraying hairspray for 30 seconds in your hair would hurt our Earth but it actually does. When you use any kind of spray can it releases gasses that hurt our atmosphere. Pollution affects the Earth majorly but it also hurts the plants, animals, and humans living on it. Air pollution is a huge problem, especially in China where there are almost 1.5 billion people. In the article How Air Pollution is Destroying our Earth it says that areas where there is high air pollution have reported many cases of lung cancer, heart diseases, and even death caused by strokes all relating to their poor air quality. Pollution doesn't only affect humans but our plants and animals, our sources of food. If we don't do something now our world will never be the same.
The power to change the world rests in our hands. The blog Rubiconsaid ,“the rate of people that recycle is around 34% if we were to get it up to 75% the effect would be like removing 50 million passenger cars from U.S roads.” That would have a great impact in our world. Yet that is not the only thing we can do to save the environment. There are thousands of daily things in your life that you can change. For example: we could reduce how many trips we take in our car, and reduce the use of electricity. These are simple to change in our daily life that could help the environment. Even though we can’t control the big factories, we can change those small things in your life to decrease your carbon footprint. It’s hard to understand that if everyone does their part we could change the world. A lot of people don’t do anything because they think that they are the only ones doing it, and if no one does it, then why should they do it? I can understand why some people will think this because it's true, but if we all ignore what everyone else does and focus on ourselves we will slowly start to notice the change. The environment needs us, it's slowly dying and warning us little by little.
I personally have not thought about my carbon footprint and I can say that I do a lot of things that pollute the world. But after researching I realized how bad it actually is and it's only getting worse. I understand the people who don't feel like they need to do anything because it is hard to think that your tiny little bit could help.
Does your household recycle?
How do you think you could help reduce your carbon footprint?
Do you think that if we all started to recycle the world's problem would get better or do you think it would be so small it wouldn't help?
Replies
I agree there are small and big things that need to be done by everyone.
Since learning a lot more about climate change in Biology, I have wanted to start caring more about my impact on the planet. I've started doing small things like turning off lights and appliances when they are not in use, turning off my car while not driving, and I have told my mom that we should start recycling again.
I agree there are so many small things that everyone can do to help.
Nobody really realizes how important our environment is. If we keep treating it how we have been, soon enough our environment will be awful. My household reuses our plastic bags but we don't recycle other things. I feel like if we all started to recycle it would make a big difference in what our environment looks like today.
I agree, i think that many people take our environment forgranted and we need to act now.
I think that if we dont do something about how bad our pollution and enviormental situation quick it will soon start to affect us in America. Everybody could do better with recycling, our enviorment is very important to the world and the human population so keeping it clean would not only benefit the wolrd it would also greatly benefit us as well.
I agree this is a big problem now and if we continue to ignore it who knows what the world will be like in 15-30 years from now.
A lot of Americans are unaware of the sheer amount of waste and pollution they produce, me included. This isn't really our fault, we were raised to know that our plastic waste goes into the plastic bag that sits in the plastic garbage can. This isn't to say that the population is inherently at fault for the world's poor health. Many huge corporations take advantage of this planet and produce toxic chemicals and waste into once beautiful ecosystems, and they get away with it.
I agree many people don't understand how bad it is and the corporations are HUGE contributers that need to take some of the blame.
I agree with you. Sometimes we don't even realize how much waste and garbage we produce. Like you, I think that even if we can make a difference in some way by choosing to live more sustainably there are many huge corporations who don't care about this and have a terrible impact on the planet.
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