By Jake Lynn, Amelia Allen, Olivia Reiskin and Sam Hayer
When you think of Vermont, you think of the rolling hills, mountains plentifully filled with green foliage, the mountains we ski on, rivers we swim in and hundreds of farms that give us our healthy, homegrown food. When you look at our valley, it deceives you and tricks you into believing that our whole world looks like that. Vermont may have many plentiful natural resources, but our planet has a limited amount of natural resources and we need to extend their lifetimes by a great deal.
One way to do this is to make sure we recycle the things many people would normally throw away. Right now, in Vermont, we have a linear waste management system. That means that our system has a beginning (when the item is produced) and end (when the item goes to the landfill). If we recycled more, we could have a cycle as a waste management system, which means that the item is made in a factory, used, recycled and goes back to a factory to be made into something new. According to the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources (ANR), as much as 67 percent of the trash we throw away every year could be recycled. That's 229,000 tons of waste going into a landfill that could be used to create new products.
We could triple the lifetime of landfills, making the new cell in our only landfill in Coventry last nine years instead of the three it is predicted to last. Vermont needs to make it a habit of recycling items such as plastic, glass, metal and organics. If we change our recycling habits, we can help preserve our beautiful and majestic homeland. With the help of the whole state or even just our community, we can change the way we live by changing the way we recycle.
A law recently passed in Vermont called the Universal Recycling Law (also referred to as Act 148) states that after July 1, 2015, all items that could be recycled are banned from landfills. This means that it is against the law to throw recycling into the trash, yet many people still do.
Even though no one is actually checking your trash before it goes to the landfill, it is still your responsibility to keep our rolling hills, green mountains, rivers and farms a part of this beautiful state and not waste them on landfill space. Recycling is a law, yes, but it is also a choice: it's a choice to help save our planet or destroy it. The world is in our hands. We have to make the right decisions.
Harwood Union Middle School students wrote the op-ed as part of a unit devised by social studies teacher Sarah Ibson and science teacher Brian Wagner.
