How does recycling affect Global Warming?
Since manufacturing new products usually requires the use of fossil fuels, often both as ingredients in the product and factory and to power the manufacture, CO2 is released. Reusing or recycling will do two things: no more oil or other fossil fuel is needed to make the product and none will be released when it is incinerated. If the discarded product is dumped in a landfill the release of CO2 will take far longer than if it’s incinerated, in some cases it takes centuries to be released. Recycling doesn’t just include plastic bags and soda cans, you can reuse items such as appliances by getting them fixed (or doing it yourself), and that seems to be getting rare today. If it’s cheaper to buy a new microwave then nobody bothers to do anything to fix an older model which is incredibly wasteful and short-sighted but that’s the society we live in. It often costs money to recycle things such as old computers and other equipment so few companies or cities will do this on their own without a
