Understanding Recycling

The human brain isnt very good at comprehending things at a very large scale

. Our intuition is based on our experiences, making us good at speculating what might have happened in a room or managing a room full of underlings, but not so good at getting our heads around the distance between Earth and Mars, a minimum of 36 million miles - a distance that is so mind-bogglingly large that if you were to aim a torch at Mars and turn it on, it would take nearly 5 minutes before the light hit Mars surface.

It is this downfall which makes raising environmental awareness problematic. Causing the environmental problem in the first place is understandable; the ramifications of global industry were not immediately obvious when these industries were at a local scale and developing unsustainable techniques. However, now that as a species, we are aware of the bigger picture and the issue of global ecology as a whole, enforcing a change is difficult. People simply arent predisposed to dealing with numbers at a global scale.

For this reasons, it can often be more effective to contextify the scale of the problem with points of reference that are easy to understand at a glance. To illustrate this notion consider that in the UK we produce over 100 million tones of household waste a year. That number is difficult to come to terms with, so instead lets give the statement a relatable context after being fed through waste compactors, the UK produces enough waste to fill the Albert hall in two hours. A years worth of trash, when compressed, could fill Lake Windermere.

Apart from producing some comically surreal mental imagery, properly expressing the scale of the problem on a level that can be quickly comprehending is vital, because addressing this problem will require everyone to pitch in. Everybody produces waste about eight times our own bodyweight per year in actual fact (see how I did that?) therefore properly managing that waste will require responsibility over that rubbish to be assigned at an individual level.

Of course, adjusting to a scale that we can understand does not automatically make everything simple. For example: consider that every plastic bottle recycled saves enough energy to light a 60 watt incandescent light-bulb for 6 hours. However, consider the energy used by the recycling facility to run a baler compactor or a plastic crushing system. Does such equipment pay for itself in terms of energy saving? In this case, it does, but not all issues are so very clear cut. How much pollution is caused by the power plant in order to recharge the batteries of an electric car do you suppose, compared to the pollution produced by burning an equivalent amount of fuel in a conventional car? What about the pollution caused by manufacturing the battery?

by: Factgasm

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