Green is the New Normal

Every day pounds of garbage are created in the United States. “In a lifetime, the average American will throw away 600 times his or her adult weight in garbage,” says Boston College’s newspaper editor. That is about 90,000 pounds of trash for each person.

That trash is dumped in landfills, where it will sit for the rest of an adult life time and even generations to come. “Plastic items can take up to 1000 years to decompose in landfills…Aluminum cans take 80 to 200 years to get completely decomposed…and glass takes a million years to decompose,” says Recycling Expert, Rick LeBlanc. “In every three-month period, enough aluminum cans are thrown away in America that the entire American commercial air fleet can be rebuilt.”

Much of this garbage, however, can avoid the landfill altogether. If the Normal, Illinois apartment complexes, Campus Point and Heartland Village, would encourage their residents to recycle by creating a recycling service in their complexes, the percentage of trash in landfills would decrease, creating a clean and green atmosphere around Normal, Illinois.

According to Recycling Revolution, “Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours.”

These residents, in the Campus Point and Heartland Village, are mainly college students and, these young adults are the future leaders of America. If recycling is promoted now by these young adults, then recycling will have a better chance to grow.

Recycling can easily become a habit that college students can get into, a habit that can be carried into their everyday life, promoting it with their friends, family, and future children. Quoted by recyclingacrossamerica.org, “Improving and increasing recycling is one of the greatest opportunities for our environment, our natural resources, and our economy.” Everything points to the fact the recycling is simply something we should do. We need to inspire these young adults to make Normal, Illinois cleaner by encouraging recycling.

We can do this by placing an easily, accessible recycling dumpster in a central location in both apartment complex, Campus Point and Heartland Village. This will create an easy way to begin recycling for the residents of these complexes. According to recycleacrossamerica.org, “Currently less than 35% of households and less than 10% of businesses in the U.S. recycle.”

But we can change this.