How Recycling becomes the Tip of Climate-Change Scales
Germany is often being reprimanded for its underperformance in recycling, despite its reputation as a pioneer and avantgarde[1]. Expectedly, outside of Germany, it doesn't look better, to a degree that pointing towards Germany's allegedly innovative separation of different wastes doesn't hold up to one's own underperformance: A recently published study[2] has shown that in the US, paper and cardboard worth millions of dollars are wasted due to improper recycling procedures. Now it was not the point to emphasise the waste of paper as all wastes that can be reprocessed are ought to. This accounts for wastes like plastic, which is known to infest the oceans and, in microscopically small shape, enters our bodies, from which it can even be “inherited”[3]. (Not to speak of the fact that very little plastic is actually being recycled, despite having just the right traits to be nearly infinitely being recycled[4]) But paper is a particularly crucial issue because of the raw material it is produced of, namely wood. Trees play an important role in our combat against climate change because of their essential ability to convert CO2 into oxygen. Many times when people became aware of Brazilian farmers' deforestation in the Amazon forest to create more arable land, the rainforest was described as the 'lung of the earth', a false equivalence[5] not only because algae in the oceans encapsulate disproportionately more CO2 than the rainforest[6]. (Algae can also contain hazardous materials like Bisphenol A[7]) But trees still play a major role, indisputably, which is also the reason why awareness has risen for the need to plant more trees altogether, globally, while reducing their felling for whichever purposes. We have already seen the consequences of losing entire forests while degrading their amount simultaneously because of vermin such as the bark beetle.[8][9]