When I first moved to Brantford for school, I wasn’t really surprised that people around here recycled. But when I found out that Brantford had a two-sort recycling program, I was a bit surprised. I had never heard of such a recycling program. For me recycling meant putting all my paper, cardboard and empty juice cartons in a blue bin, and nothing more than that. But when I came to Brantford, recycling became much more than that.
I learned about the two-sort program, where each residence would have two blue bins and in the first bin, they’d put all their paper products and in the second bin they’d dispose their empty containers.
In fact, a lot of municipalities around Ontario use this program, but I had never heard of it and during my entire first year of university, I had been recycling wrong the wrong way.
I would put all my containers and paper products all in one bin and put the bin out by the curb every Tuesday. But I soon realized that importance of sorting out my recycling.
With climate change becoming a bigger issue, it’s very important for us to recycle effectively, if we want to make a change. Recycling effectively is how, we as students, can do our part in saving the planet.
After realizing I had been recycling the wrong way, it became crucial for me to learn to recycle the correct way and do my part in not slowing killing the planet.
When we put recyclable materials into their respective bins, the process of recycling those materials becomes a lot easier and recycling companies end up not burning as much fuel and energy.
When we dispose all our recyclable materials in one bin, someone has to go through all the products and sort them. This would be done in a factory and in the end would contribute to polluting the Earth more than doing harm. This is because heavy machinery and conveyor belts are used to sort out these materials. What would only take us 30 seconds to do is done by wasting hours of sorting on conveyor belts.
And from there, a lot of recyclable items are taken to landfills. This is because of people not sorting out their recycling and mixing all the products into one bin. The perfectly good recyclable products get contaminated by the non-recyclable products and it’s better to throw them away, then get it cleaned. For example, is a juice carton was thrown in the same bin as a newspaper and there was still some juice left in the carton that leaked onto the newspaper, the newspaper would no longer be recyclable and would go to the landfills to rot.
With small changes to our daily lives and being more aware of different programs run by the city we live in; we can go one step closer to helping save the planet.
Your local municipality is always happy to help you out and educate you on what products go in the recycling and how we can contribute to this great cause. All you have to do is just ask and educate yourself.
After all, we’re starting to face the wrath of climate change and if we don’t do anything about it, there may not be another generation to face the wrath of our beautiful planet.
