Dear President,

With all the complaints concerning pollution and recycling laws, I am sure you have heard something of it. Every past president has blown the issue off, and hasn’t done anything drastic to change it. The wide topic of recycling is one of the most ignored subjects there is. And if we keep ignoring it, then trash will keep piling up, recycling will keep getting contaminated, and no one will hear about it. This is why we have to do something.

One of the biggest problems is that people aren’t aware of what actually happens. It all starts in citizens homes. You are in your house, eating a simple snack. You throw away your wrapper, but are not sure whether to put it in the recycling or trash. But you don’t care, and put it in the trash. It then gets picked up by the garbage man and is sorted in a factory, but they can’t sort out every piece of recycling they find. And even if they do, the recycling is contaminated with all of the grease and food from the trash. It then goes to a gigantic pile of other junk which sits there for years and years. Aluminum cans take 80-200 years to decompose, plastic items take a 1000 years, and glass takes around 1 million years if it does at all.

“It is just one piece!” people say.

One piece can make all the difference. What they don’t know, is about everyone says that. There are around 7 billion people on earth. If every person puts one piece of recycling in the trash, then that is 7 billion pieces of recycling wasted.

There is just too much trash that could have been recycled. People aren’t aware of all of the products they are wasting. The average person has the opportunity to recycle more than 25,000 cans alone in their lifetime. There are mandatory recycling laws in some states, but in the states that don’t have any, people don’t have a clue about this horrible reality. There needs to be mandatory recycling laws in all, if not most states. If it was a law, then it would have to be known to the public. And if it is known to the public, then people would actually know what is going on around them and have a chance to help. If you make a law then people would have to obey, and the amount of recycled products that are wasted would go down a significant amount.

Some may argue that the only reason people don’t recycle is because they are lazy. This is part of the problem, but if citizens are aware of what they are doing, they might not make the same decisions they used to. People try to ignore it by not exposing themselves to the cold, harsh reality. They push the problem to the back of their minds, too arrogant to realize they are the reason for this mess.

Will you try to help prevent the cause of the earth becoming a dirty, polluted wasteland, or go on with your life, and just wait until everything falls apart?

Sincerely, Corinne