I would like to address Monday’s column titled “Don’t waste your time recycling.” First and foremost, our country’s annual recycling expenditures are very minimal when compared to something like national defense or the attempted $700 billion financial bailout. Recycling is definitely not the area to try to “lean-down” the government. The column stated that recycling costs Americans around $8 billion per year. If you do the math (300 million Americans), that’s about $25 per person per year — well worth the expense, as opposed to being wasteful.

This article did contain some good information, but it was misdirected to support entirely the wrong focus. For example, landfills do provide a very good opportunity to harness energy. However, none of this energy potential is generated from the items that are regularly recycled (i.e. paper/cardboard, metal, glass, etc.) because none of these materials give off any form of a gas. Rather, this energy comes from biogases that are produced from the landfill substances that biodegrade (i.e. food waste, mulch, sewage, etc.). I agree, this energy should be harnessed and reused. However, throwing away more paper will not help anything. Furthermore, building “tree farms” reduces land that could be better used by agriculture or be kept natural.

This column contains no strong points proving recycling is a bad thing. We need to strategically use the resources of this world. One of the best ways to do this is to reuse and recycle these resources.

Jake Oakland

Senior

Industrial Engineering