Saving the Ticking Bomb that is our EnvironmentAs many other things in our life, we take the environment for granted. We spend our everyday life without a single care that something could happen to it. But it is our constant mistreat of it that??™s leading to its destruction. Indeed, the environment is dying in front of our eyes, and it is our duty to save it before it??™s too late. If you cannot think of simple ways to help it, here are some good, easy-to-do examples that you can follow. First, we can recycle. Even if it sounds rather obvious, many are unaware of the incredible benefits of recycling materials.
For example, just by recycling paper we are already saving trees. Also by manufacturing with recycled materials we can save energy and water in our planet and produce less air pollution, which is another factor that??™s destroying our environment. We can also recycle glass, which takes nearly a million years to break down if it??™s sent to a landfill.
By recycling glass we can re-use it in a matter of just 30 days; convenient and harmless to the environment. Another material that we can easily recycle is plastic. By recycling plastic we can save our resources of materials like fossil fuel, and also prevent the accumulation of waste in landfills, especially since plastic is very durable and breaks down really slowlyA second way to help our environment is planting trees. Some of its benefits are commonly known by everyone, like the fact that they absorb CO2 and in return produce O2 for us, or provide the living habitat for birds or other animal life forms.
However, they also serve other purposes we are not aware of, most of the time. For example, trees can reduce the levels of erosion in the ground by breaking the fall of the rain. They can also reduce urban water runoff; it??™s been reported that 100 trees can reduce runoff by 100, 000 gallons. Another benefit of planting trees is that they can save water when planted near lawns, since their shade can slow down water evaporation, effectively reducing the amount of water needed for them. The third simple way of saving our environment is avoiding the use of chemicals. Spray cans, while certainly not as dangerous as they used to be in the 80s or 90s, can still damage the environment and damage the ozone layer, contributing to global warming. One chemical that is incredibly dangerous though is chlorine. Chlorine is a substance often used, for example, on pools and industries, and the contamination caused by this chemical can be really harmful to creatures that live in the soil or water.
If we avoid the overuse of these chemicals and sprays can help the environment more than we can imagine. Finally, one of the most important points: preserving our natural resources. The most important resource to us all is, without a doubt, water. In our daily life we use and consume water without ever wondering how our lives could be if we didn??™t had access to it like we do. I??™ll have you know, that is the reality of many countries or villages in third world countries around the world. Many of these villages don??™t have enough water for consumption for several reasons: some use their water on production of food; some others don??™t even have drinkable water, since their rivers are all poisoned with chemicals and toxins. Such a cruel reality should not be lived by anyone, therefore we have to do something about this, so we can conserve water for those places, and also so we don??™t share their horrible fate. But how can we save water if we have to use it so much There are actually plenty of ways to do it.
For example, one of the most common things we do to waste giant amounts of water is using our toilets as waste baskets. Many times we have some trash we want to dispose of, and the easiest way to do it is by dumping it into a toilet and flushing. However, every time we do that, we are wasting around 7 gallons of water! Another way we can save water in the home is by taking shorter showers. Did you know that spending 4 minutes in the shower wastes approximately 30 gallons of water Many people spend much more time washing up. A third thing we could do to conserve some water is keeping a bottle of drinking water in the fridge for consumption, instead of running water from our taps to drink a bit of water when we are thirsty. We always end up wasting more water than what we drink, so using a bottle instead can end up saving a lot of drinkable water.
Our environmental problem may seem too gigantic for us to solve it on our own. However, if we all help just a little to help the environment, we really can make a difference. Having awareness of the situation and possible alternatives to remedy it is the first step. Individual actions may seem useless, however when multiple people do that same individual action, we could really help our dying planet, it would definitely thank us if we did. Name: Sebastian Bragado H.
