Plastic is a form of oil, so recycle

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Little Riverdale has a big problem — bottles and cans orphaned, homeless and alone.

They stare out at you from the gutters, sidewalks, garbage cans and even the grass in our parks. They lie there, sad at being tossed away so casually by their owners. They will never be of use again.

Riverdale citizens abandon their metal cans and plastic bottles with great enthusiasm. It’s bad for our streets, sidewalks and parks and we burn more oil to make more of them. 

Plastic is a form of oil. It takes oil to make and transport those plastic bottles to your local grocery store. It takes 17 million barrels of oil every year to make all those plastic water bottles we buy (source: Business Insider). Each barrel contains 42 gallons of oil. We throw away the vast majority of those bottles. Just a little more than 10 percent of the bottles we buy are recycled. That means we toss out more than 25 billion bottles every year. 

So, when we throw away a plastic bottle, we are guaranteeing that more oil is going to be used to make a new bottle. The production of one 16-ounce plastic bottle requires as much as four ounces of oil (source: Pacific Institute). Recycling one ton of plastic saves the equivalent of 1,000 to 2,000 gallons of gasoline (source: www.mrcpolymers.com).

Throwing away metal cans costs us dearly as well. Each American tosses into the garbage about 425 metal cans a year (source: Container Recycling Institute). It wastes far less energy for the metal can industry to use recycled cans than it is to manufacture new cans. Recycling one metal can saves a half gallon of gasoline (source: www.recycling-revolution.com).

I have picked up bottles and cans lying everywhere, from the sidewalks and gutters of streets to the lawn of the church across from my apartment house, putting them in my backpack and then recycling them, embarrassing my family. But, clearly, the problem is far bigger than one person can solve. You see them all over the place.

recycle, plastic, oil, Mike Gold
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