Why-Cycle?

Why should you recycle(Why-Cycle)? Well it's good for the environment, by recycling your doing something with all that garbage. Giving it purpose so you don't just throw it in a landfill or emitting more carbon by making new stuff. However this fails to address the fact that there are two more R-Words you should be doing before you throw something in the waste.

First, you should be using less stuff in the beginning so you have less stuff to recycle.

Second, why not make purpose from that waste yourself? Use coffee grounds as fertilizer, and plastic bottles can be refilled at home, or cute into flower pots.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, but wait we live in grand forks North Dakota. So have fun being a good person because even if you do an amazing job at R-1 and R-2 once you get to the third one it all goes out the window. Recycle? Oh you mean increase carbon emissions by running separate trucks to pick up recyclable materials, and then dumping in the same landfill as all your other trash that a big gas guzzling truck picked up just the other day.

In grand forks the recycling just gets sent to a landfill because right now no one is taking it from us. Our system is fundamentally broken, because at the end of the day, most of us aren't even reducing or reusing. You go to the store and get a case of water that is packages in plastic bottles, wrapped in a plastic label, all of them wrapped together in a plastic case. You check out and your plastic wrapped lettuce gets put in a plastic bag, next to your avocados which you took extra time out of your day to put in a special plastic bag that we said is for produce. Like honestly does an avocado really need a plastic bag around it, is the lettuce going to contaminate it on the 10-minute drive home?

And then you get home, take that plastic avocado bag, put it in your plastic trash bag along with that plastic grocery bag. Even if it was all getting recycled (which it isn't) why use all that plastic in the first place?

I'm not looking down on anyone because I am as guilty as the next person of this. I don't buy cases of water but I still get bottles of water occasionally. I still put my apples in a plastic grocery bag. Generally i'll avoid using plastic grocery bags as often as possible, but i'm not reusing any of this stuff.

This has been a big tangent but I can't help but feel that right now the system is completely non-functioning. Why-Cycle? I know it's cheesy but right now if you live in one of the coldest cities in the continental US, then your answer is no, because it's pointless, and it doesn't address the fundamental issue. Also one day it will have a point again but not right now.