Global warming and littering
Littering makes our lands, roads, and cities look disgusting, no doubt about it. It is everyone’s responsibility to clean up after themselves in an earth-friendly manner but unfortunately, many assume that someone else will clean up their trash. Signs along the roads stating fines for littering are ignored and defaced or torn down as pranks. The result is tons of ugly trash blighting the forests, fields, cities and highways.
There is no reason for any of us to litter because we can always find a trash can to throw the trash away. There are many ways to cut back on littering. There are a lot of ways to cut back on litter, such as making companies keep their bus shelters and phone booths clean, banning people from handing out flyers and leaflets in the streets and parking lots without a license, and making stores and businesses responsible for keeping their parking lots clean.
It is very important to recycle because it helps lower the amount of letter that is spread out in the environment and into the landfills. All of us need to learn more about recycling because our ignorance in this contributes to littering. The energy used by highway cleanup crews creates even more emissions, polluting the air and aggravating the global warming problem. There are so many things that can be recycled and reused for other purposes rather than allowing them to deface our lands.
Biodegradable bags are a very affordable, reusable replacement for plastic bags made from oil. Non biodegradable plastic bags can be recycled but a vast majority of people simply include them in their weekly trash pickup, where they ultimately end up in a landfill for decades before they begin to break down. Using your own cloth shopping bags or requesting biodegradable plastic bags will go a long way toward helping to use every resource we have to its fullest. Quite often, plastic bags end up carried on the wind from unsecured trash container and come to rest in fields and waterways, endangering animals and humans alike. One recyclable plastic or cloth bag can eliminate the pollution and harmful chemicals from hundreds of the plastic bags commonly used in big chain stores.
This type of litter can pose great danger to wildlife as well as water and soil. Plastic bags and plastic rings can easily get wrapped around a bird or other animal’s neck and cause harm or death by starvation or suffocation. Litter is also eaten by both birds and animals, causing sometimes fatal gastrointestinal distress or diseases. Plastic bags and other non-biodegradable objects that humans casually throw from their cars or drop when they’re done with them also pollute the water sources wildlife depends on. Soil pollution from litter affects our plants and trees and further degrades our atmosphere as it inhibits the process of natural carbon dioxide use.
Recently, several neighborhood programs have begun to regularly clean up not only their own immediate environment but other sections of their cities and highways. Leading by example, these types of programs have slowly been spreading throughout the United States and have made a dent in a very messy and harmful problem.
