Recycling Is Essential

This week for argument writing, we were focusing on recycling with a topic called "Recycling is Essential". I found this topic very fun as I thought it was a awesome topic to argue on. Do you think recycling is essential? Do you recycle? Read my argument to see what I think about recycling!

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Recycling Is Essential….

I strongly believe that recycling is essential. Do you recycle? Well if you don’t maybe you should start now. Recycling to soo soo soo important because rubbish is killing animals because of horrible garbage islands!! Did you know that many items of rubbish takes 100’s or even 1000’s of years to decompose,  and there are many substitutes that you can use instead of rubbish!!

Garbage Islands are expected to double in size over the next 10yrs!!!!!!!! That is terrible! The size of the Great Pacific Garbage Island is twice the size of Texas and stretches for 100’s of miles across the North Pacific Ocean. According to the Garbage Patch website, 80% of the rubbish comes from land in North America and Asia and the 20% comes from water based activity. The major part of this 20% around 705,000 tons, is fishing nets. Bird-life and many other sea creatures are getting caught up in all these nets and plastic. Quite often turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish.

Rubbish takes 100’s and 1000’s of year to decompose, that is a long time!

Greener Idea tells us that plastic bags takes 10-1000 years to break down and plastic bottles take 450 yrs!! Imagine all those crafts and activities that you could make using plastic bottles!! In the USA only,  every year around 18 billion disposable nappies are being used and thrown away. These take 250-500 years to decompose. Even though it would mean you would have to do a bit more washing, maybe you could consider cloth nappies instead.

Substitutes for plastic are slowly entering our world!! Nowadays in some NZ supermarkets like Countdown you have to bring in your reusable bags as they are in the process of going completely plastic bag free. Instead of going into cafes every time and buying a takeaway coffee in a little disposable paper cup, maybe you can buy a keep cup for just around $30-40. In some cafes now if you bring in your keep-cup they will give you a refill for free! Instead of wrapping your daily sandwich for school in glad-wrap maybe you could try the new honeycomb wrap. A couple of months ago, Adidas has released a new set of shoes called Ultra-boost Parley which are made using plastic from the ocean!! How cool is it being able to make a shoe out of plastic…….what a great recycling idea!!

Now that I’ve informed you of how important it is to recycle maybe you too can change your habits. Garbage islands are a terrible terrible place for your rubbish, rubbish doesn't just take a couple of months to break down and there are many substitutes that you can use instead!!!!!