Recycling is a way of making items useful again that would have normally been thrown away and is a responsible way of taking care of God’s planet. Recycling is important for many reasons; one is that it keeps us from being wasteful. There are many important factors of recycling like: what it is, the process, important reasons to recycle, the benefits, what can be recycled, how recycling was used in World War II, the history of recycling, and other ways of recycling.

Recycling is helpful and good for many reasons. Recycling has many steps to its process. The word cycle comes from the Greek word kyklos, which means circle or wheel (Stefoff 27). Recycling is a repeating where individual people, government, and business are all involved and work together. This cycle helps in many ways like saving money, natural resources and room in landfills. “Recycling turns materials that would otherwise become waste into valuable resources” (Recycling” 1). This cycle helps in many ways like saving money, saving natural resources, saving room in the landfills and many other ways too.
Recycling is a process and like all processes it contains steps. This quote explains the goal of recycling: “ Recycling refers to the process of collecting used materials which are usually considered ‘waste’ and reprocessing them.” (Gosh. 1) There are four main methods to collecting recyclable products: curbside, drop-off centers, buy back centers and deposit refund programs (“Recycling”2). This makes collection the first step. After they are cleaned and separated, the second step begins and products are manufactured with total or partial recycled content. To do this they turn the products back into raw materials (“Recycling”). Common household items that are made from recycled products are newspapers, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, and items like those. The process is still not fully complete.


The process is completed with the last step. “Purchasing recycled products completes the recycling loop.” (“Recycling” 2) This step ends the process. To be successful process, people have to buy recycled products. “ The more people step forward to buy recycled products the better the success of the recycling process can be ensured.” (Gosh 1) This means it is saving the company money and causing less waste. Recycling saves space for waste to be disposed of “Most of the landfill sites are filled up with a lot of waste products that could have been recycled effectively” (Gosh 2). Recycling also helps us save natural resources. Recycling is good stewardship of our planet, just like cleaning your room is essential to taking care of a bedroom.
There are many benefits of recycling. Many of the benefits are economical “Similar to energy and natural resource, recycling also helps in saving a lot of expense, demanded for the production of the new products from ‘virgin’ materials (Gosh 2). This means it saves them money from having to mine materials to make new products. This means they don’t have to mine as much, which saves the natural resources they would have had to mine to make the product. “Recycling saves the environmental conditions and reduces pollution” (Gosh 1). Recycling reduces pollution; this makes recycling a smart decision for everyone.
There are very many items that can be recycled “Some of the most common items that are recycled are plastic, glass, paper, batteries, aluminum, etc.” (Gosh 1). Recycling these items is pretty successful except batteries. There are about 100 billion aluminum cans used each year in the U.S., about fifty-five percent is recycled. Steel can be recycled about sixty-four percent of all steel is recycled (Hartman 1). Steel is one of the worlds most recycled materials. There are many materials that can be recycled instead of being thrown away and taking up room in a landfill.
Recycling also played a part in World War II. During World War II, recycling was important; Tin cans, scrap metal, glass, paper and even nylon stockings were recycled for the war effort. (Stefoff 17) Recycling was important for making war supplies “Much recycling was accomplished in the United States during World War II.” (Kimball 2). The reason for recycling being successful during this time was because the materials were needed for making war supplies. Recycling was a big help during World War II but collective effort for recycling decreased after it was no longer a necessity.
Here is some information about recent history of recycling. After the 1980’s the general population began to recycle its newspapers, aluminum cans and glass in masse” (Kimball 5). There still was a solid waste problem. Consumers demanded recycling be made easy; so attempts at curbside recycling were made (Kimball 10). This made recycling more convenient and easier. Recycling was now working well.
There are some other ways of recycling that are a little more creative. Making old things useful is also recycling (Nardo 74). An example of this is to take a peanut butter jar and use it to store cooking ingredients. Another creative way is to make handmade paper out of used paper, which works well for things like greeting cards. “It will take two hours for the basic papermaking process” (Mendelow 1). The paper made will be a hundred percent post consumer paper. This means that all the paper has been used before. This is a creative and fun way to recycle.
Recycling is a smart decision; that helps us in many ways like saving money, saving natural resources, preventing pollution, and helps keep us from being wasteful. Recycling in America is also a good example of cooperation between the citizens and the government