Green Earth

In 2008, WALL-E warned us all of a day where our waste problem would consume the only earth we have. The robot charged with searching for signs of life on the trashed planet continued to come up empty. An oddly familiar situation as foreign countries who take on the United States' recycled goods are becoming full of unusable garbage. Many of these countries are no longer willing to sort through our "recycling" as it is no longer profitable due to improper recycling. This inattention to detail leads to piles of garbage unable to be sorted for reuse. Shipping containers full of waste are being shipped back to the United States as foreign governments are tired of being wastelands for American trash. This should be a wake up call to every private citizen and company alike that proper recycling should be practiced to ensure the health of our planet. Experts claim that it is better not to recycle if you are not going to recycle properly. In the age of the Internet, guidelines on how to sort waste into those blue bins are at our fingertips. But like the people in WALL-E's world, laziness is consuming us as a population. We have the information and technology on how to reduce waste, reuse items, and recycle properly, yet we use five plastic straws a day, carry home plastic bags of groceries every week, and carelessly toss items in a blue recycle bin. We have reduced carbon emissions over the last forty years. But is it enough? We recycle more but the garbage flow has remained steady. Should we not make more of an effort to protect our beautiful earth? Our job as keepers of this earth is to protect it from harm and we are doing quite the opposite. We need plants like that in Huntsville, Alabama that uses carbon from the air to bottle CO2. We need companies making great products out of our waste. We need our governments to step up and set laws protecting our environment. We need conscious minds to reduce, reuse and recycle. Just a thought.