Here’s an editorial by Cicily Murray, a junior at Jackson High School!

After a nice long workout at the gym, you drink a bottle of Gatorade, but then what? You throw the empty bottle into a trash can.. Wouldn’t it be nice to not only feel like you look great, but feel like you’re a great person for recycling your empty bottle? This dream could become reality if the state of Ohio made a law that every sports facility in Ohio be required to have a plastic bottle recycling bin. “… producing new plastic products from recycled materials uses two-thirds less energy than is required to make products from raw materials.” –Earth911.com. Not only would recycling be more energy efficient, it could almost be thought of as another source of income for these facilities!

From my own experience, I know that my dance studio uses approximately 150 plastic bottles every day. The studio is open five days a week, meaning we use about 750 plastic bottles a week. Our studio is open 45 weeks, or 225 days in a year, which means that we use about 33,750 plastic bottles every year. If we receive five cents for every bottle recycled, that would add up to almost $1700.00 every year. And to think, that’s just what one dance studio could do, imagine the effect a high school football game, a college game, the Buckeyes, or every sports facility in the state! The benefits also expand out to helping with the economy in more ways! This would require people to collect it, receive it, organize it, and many more things. This was an idea that the manager of the Jackson Township Recycling Center, Chuck Gandee had.

Another way this would benefit us is by conserving space in landfills. Americans use, on average, 4 million plastic bottles every hour. For every ton of plastic bottles we recycle, we save 7.4 cubic inches of landfill space. Although 7.4 cubic inches doesn’t seem like much, this would all add up quickly, considering that, on average, American’s use 200 pounds of plastic every year. Not only do we save the space, but we could also contribute the recycled materials where they are needed! According to the American Chemistry Council, the demand for recycled plastics is much larger than the available supply. Plastic is actually made of the non-renewable source, petroleum, making the demand for it even greater!

It only seems to make sense that plastic bottle recycling bins be required in sports facilities. Recycling, especially recycling plastic is a very important part of our community’s future. Not only would it help our environment, it will help control our waste, improve our economy, and use our energy more efficiently. Recycled plastic can be reused for many things, not just more plastic bottles. They can be transformed into “…a yo-yo, a kayak, a fleece pullover, and your school lunch tray…” Recycle so that our plastic can be put to good use, as opposed to being put into a hole in the ground, to do nothing but take another 700 years to decompose.