- Question
- Does recycling work?
- Position1 of 2›
- Yes, recycling does work and improves the environment
- Argument1 of 3›
Recycling cleans up the environment
Recycling helps keep trash off the street, making the world cleaner.
The argument
The whole point of recycling is to clean up waste, and the measure of whether it works is whether material that would otherwise have been discarded is instead put to use. On that measure it does work, because the transformation is real: with recycling, paper, metal, and other things are not merely collected but turned into something entirely different from what they were. The range of what can be made is wider than people often assume. Soda bottles became the dress Emma Watson wore to the Met Gala in 2016, an illustration that recovered material is not confined to low-grade uses but can re-enter production at any level. Wasted food can be put in dirt to be used as fertilizer, returning to the soil to grow more food rather than sitting in a heap. In each case something that was finished as one thing starts again as another. Two environmental benefits follow directly. The first is at the input end: recycling avoids wasting expendable resources, because material drawn back into use is material that does not have to be extracted, grown or mined again. Every bottle that becomes fabric is a quantity of new material that was not required. The second is at the output end: recycling diminishes landfills, since waste that is reprocessed is waste that is not buried, and the space and contamination that burial involves are avoided along with it. The two effects work in the same direction and address the problem from both ends, reducing what is taken out of the environment and what is put back into it as refuse. Clearly, then, recycling works to benefit the environment: because recycling cleans up the environment, recycling does work and improves the environment.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Only certain things can be recycled. Plastic and styrofoam can’t be broken down or sorted by the machines used at recycling plants. In fact, they could break them.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] Not every company and society does this. Some materials are not reused and are therefore left in landfills.