This project focuses on recycling, but why is it so important? Every year, mankind increases its carbon emissions by over 38 million tons. This causes global climate destabilization and doesn’t only warm the Earth, it can cool it down too.
Where I live, Boise, Idaho, it is hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Our winters used to last forever with snow falling throughout the season. Now, this seems to be changing. Over the past two years we haven’t had much snow except for a few rare storms. This year, we had about three days where it snowed but quickly melted away. In fact, our local ski resort, Bogus Basin, experienced their latest opening day on record, January 19, because of the lack of snow, causing them to lose more than 2 million dollars.
In the United States alone, people throw away 195 million tons of garbage each year. That is about 390 billion pounds of garbage each year. This is equivalent to the weight of 177.06 trillion one dollar bills. If everyone had recycled at least half of this weight, we could save 1,365,000,000,000 Kwh of energy or 1.365 terrawats of electricity. “Had the 50.7 billion cans wasted in 2001 been recycled, they would have saved the energy equivalent of 16 million barrels of crude oil: enough energy to generate electricity for 2.7 million U.S. homes for a year, or enough to supply over a million cars with gasoline for a year.” We all need to recycle more.
