Here is a little article I wrote about recycling history. Everyone knows how important it is to recycle. It's certainly one of the hottest topics in the news today. Many people may not realize it but recycling has been around for a very long time. Throughout our recycling history, it was a way of life because our everyday needs were made by hand. Some of the things people used to do were melt down any kind of metal then make new tools or even jewerly of it. Of course, recycle newspaper and/or paper to make new paper. The focus on recycling hit very close to home during WWII when American needed metal to help with the war effort. Government started urging Americans to recycle any kind of metal they had, whether it be pots or pans, garden tools or silverware. Once the war was over, people continued to recycle for many more years until the 1960's and 70's when we started to realize that all of the waste we produced has been building up at a extremely rapid pace. It has become clear that something had to be done, otherwise landfills were going to overflow. During this time approximately 6% of America's waste was recycled-today 33% of the 254 million tons of garbage gets recycled.

Of course, not all recycleables are created equal. Many of the items that get recycled require special care and handling. E-waste is the name given to materials that cannot be mixed with other recycling products. A lot of people in other countries have gotten sick from polluted waters from e-waste factories. In China, for example, rivers became contaminated after discarded computer boards were dumped into them. In trying to keep workers safe, industry regulations have set up safe and reliable ways to sort everything out. There are a few different ways of doing this. One is called multi stream, where aluminum cans go in one particular bin, tin cans go in another and glass in yet another. Single stream recycing is another way it is done in some communities and it doesn't require any sorting at all. It's just all put together and experts say people are likely to do this because it doesn't involve much effort. The down side to this is that many materials will probable contaminate each other. We must all work together and keep our world cleaner and healthier for our future.