You have a plastic bottle in your hand.  In front of you are two bins, a recycling and a waste bin.  The rational action here would be to just put your bottle in the recycling bin.  Surprisingly though, many of you would instead throw the bottle in the waste bin. 

This action happens all the time in our school, which shows it’s time for people to start changing their habits- not only with plastic bottles, but with other recyclable waste as well.

According to A Recycling Revolution, around one billion trees of paper are thrown away every year.  Those one billion trees could definitely be recycled, if not reused every year.  This would reduce the amount of trees we would need to cut down in the first place.

Recycling awareness has gone up in the past years, yet people are still not recycling everything they could.  This is leading to an unreasonable amount of waste.  According to Green Change, if everyone in the world lived like Americans, we would need five earths to sustain us.  Either we need to start being more resourceful and less wasteful, or we need to put our waste in the right bins.  If we keep heading down this path of waste, our world could end up like something out of Wall-E, possibly a massive garbage heap.

Of course, some people are not able to recycle due to not having ways of recycling.  Maybe their city doesn’t offer the program, or their family cannot afford to pay to recycle. Either way, everyone can and should recycle at school.

From the boxes that exist in almost every classroom, to the new recycling coke bottles in the cafeteria, Mill Valley is more eco-friendly than ever; but only with your help.  It is up to you to take the time to properly dispose of your waste.  A few seconds of your time is a small price to pay to save the world.