In a world of digital advancement, not much has been done to keep people from harming themselves.

What I mean is that in all of our infinite wisdom, we have failed to teach ourselves about the importance of preserving our planets resources as the human race continues to become an ever-expanding presence on Earth.

It has been said by numerous experts that if people do not decrease their carbon footprint on the world, by 2030 we will have turned the Earth into a global warming crisis, and generated enough waste to stack up past the moon. 

What people don’t seem to realize it that it would take so little of then to simply give up an hour or two and help recycle.

Things like plastic bottles of water, while loveable and convenient, sit in landfills for years and will continue to do so long after the person who trashed them is gone. Just think of how much bottled water you drink in a week, and multiply those empty bottles by 300 million, the amount of people in America. That’s a lot of water bottles just piled up each week. Then multiply that by 52 weeks a year and now you have even more bottles.

If just half of these people would recycle, they could easily help prevent a developing world crisis. Recycling would not only help slow the progression of global warming, but could also make you some money and keep a steady supply of reusable materials for those that come after you.

Even in the “wasteful” journalism world, the impact of recycling is felt industry wide. We at the A&T Register are proud to print our newspaper on recycled materials, and we also recycle any additional papers that are left over each week.

This saves local landfills from adding hundreds of pounds of paper to their contents each week. Many more of our features are digital and save on resources by never even needing paper.

If people would purchase and use recycled paper it would help to drastically save trees that are logged each year for paper. These are just a few of the major things that could be done if people would help with recycling.

The important thing is that people realize that we do not have an infinite supply of resources. If we do not begin to make a difference soon, we will be forced to find other ways to live, and those ways may not exist.

Some of my classmates and I worked on a service project to help raise awareness of recycling on campus. We decided to start a campaign in collaboration with another group by designing fliers that will be posted sometime this week to help students find the different places on campus they can recycle.

Additionally, a mass email was sent out to encourage the administration, faculty, and staff to help set up recycle bins in the various buildings on campus. There are also two editorials on the A&T Register’s website including this one to help the community understand why it is important to recycle.

Just looking at the work it took to do what may seem like a small amount of work was surprising, but it helped me to realize that even the smallest efforts can have a huge impact on campus. If more people would take small steps towards helping to recycle, the combined small impacts would turn into a larger effort for serious change.

Why should you recycle? Because it is your responsibility to protect the place in which you live, and if we don’t we will be leaving a world of pollution behind for others. Landfills will overflow, and this can affect the quality of our air, water, and food.

The next time you begin to throw that soda can in the trash, or crumple up a wad of paper, think about how that small bag of trash will turn into mountains of waste. Remember the water bottles? Recycle. It will help us all live better lives. 

• Dexter R. Mullins