My map is based on the garbage that can be seen in the ocean, landfills, and recycling plants and the amount of pollution all around New York City. Usually people throw their trash in trash cans and do not really think about where it is going or what happens to it as sanitation workers remove the garbage from the trash cans and it gets hauled off to either recycling plants, landfills or some of it like plastic ends up in the ocean and marine wildlife mistake it for food and even get tangled in it causing some loss in marine life or gets washed up at the beach causing it to be covered in trash. When I was young I always believed that our garbage ended up in a recycling plant and never thought of or knew what a landfill is for such a long time until I learned about what it is. I thought that it was not good for the environment until I learned that the point of landfills is to isolate waste from its surrounding environment, preventing water contamination and stop contact with the air, which was not true, while the garbage decomposes in the landfill. But there are also dangers in placing garbage into landfills which affects the air and water by polluting it which causes a lot of problems for our health. People used to think that the trash they threw out mostly went to recycling plants and landfills but recently for a while it was discovered that it was found in streets, in the beach, in the oceans and was even buried in landfills that resulted in causing the pollution of air and water which, in turn causes various respiratory diseases and other dangerous health effects as dangerous contaminants from it causes it to be absorbed into the lungs and different parts of the body. This is caused by our decision to throw our stuff to the floor, spit on the floor without cleaning any of it up even when they are confronted to do so and even ignore when asked to clean up their mess. Recycling Garbage is a necessary part of life as it causes less pollution and saves up the used material to be reused again for the future and helps the economy greatly while cleaning up the rest of the trash that is left everywhere. According to What are the benefits of Recycling? “ Scrap cars, old bottles, junk mail and used rubber tires are becoming common features of our landfills. All of these may seem endless, but the resources required to make them are finishing off quickly. Recycling allows all of these junk items to be used over and over again so that new resources do not have to be exploited. It conserves natural resources such as water, minerals, coal, oil, gas and timber”(Rinkesh,https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/benefits-of-recycling.php).In other words, What are the benefits of Recycling are stating that recycling allows for less waste and saving more needed resources to better the planet and that they are able to lessen the amount of garbage by reusing the material. I agree with them and the reason why is that on certain products they will have a label with all the information about it and sometimes say that the product uses reused material and some trash is being cleaned up in New York. But although they made a claim that most of the recycled garbage is reused this is not the case as not all are actually recycled as some of the material is degraded from the amount every time the item is recycled and is being wasted which causes more unused material to be wasted. But what is true is that it gives more job opportunities to those that need it and more money to the workers. According to What are the benefits of Recycling “ While you may feel that recycling is each person for himself, in reality it is a huge industry within itself. After you do the basic sorting out and deposit your trash for recycling, it has to be sorted and shipped off to the right places…Certainly, one of the major benefits of recycling is that it creates more jobs in the community and provides stability to the entire process. Throwing the trash away creates some six to seven jobs at best, where recycling can help create close to thirty jobs”(Rinkesh,https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/benefits-of-recycling.php).They are right about the increased jobs in recycling plants as The U.S scrap industry generated over 150,000 direct jobs and over 323,000 indirect jobs in 2015, US recycling industry employed 1.25 million workers while the US solid waste management industry only hired 0.25 million workers, but my view, however, contrary to what they have argued, is that sometimes something will go wrong in the workplace and can lead to injuries and fines for it, it can cause workers to leave or quit and would not want to be hired at all and the business can start to lose money which in turn causes the businesses to close and become bankrupt. This can also affect the economy by causing less jobs in the recycling station and even less pay, this leads to worker stress and workplace problems and more job loss. The impacts of the Recycling Center and Landfills is that it can lead to health problems because of faulty equipment or from the pollution in the air which leads to people to complain about the environment and the measures that are not being put in place. This will start to get worse as we in the future will not be able to keep this in check and our planet will become inhabitable. According to Garbage Pollution, Causes, Effects and Solutions “Garbage pollution arises when the waste collected in dumping sites keeps rotting, spreading odor and cause air pollution in the surrounding areas…It is often seen that waste including inorganic material such as iron cans, paper, plastic, glass pieces, or leftover food, animal bones, vegetable peels etc. are dumped in the open”(Sujeet Kumar https://www.indiacelebrating.com/environmental-issues/garbage-pollution/). What makes Sujeet Kumar right in his claims is that the trash is piling up and it is making it difficult for people to lead normal lives as pollution has more of an effect on us causing us to develop more problems in life. According to Garbage Pollution: Causes, Effects and Solutions “In our country, the cities are getting reduced to dumping grounds of waste. Garbage is present everywhere in some form or the other whether there is a village or a city, a temple or a mosque. This problem has been increasing since the last nearly three decades, leading to health issues and degradation of the environment. Today we are victims of many types of waste including domestic, agricultural and industrial waste…The rest either accumulates in the fields or in the streets and in the end, during the rainy season; it reaches the oceans through rivers”(Sujeet Kumar https://www.indiacelebrating.com/environmental-issues/garbage-pollution/ )Although others may say that with the Recycling plants and Landfills, the planet is much more cleaner and safer due to less strain from pollution and reusing of materials to save leftover unused material. However this is not the case as this map below shows the areas where the waste is most common at.
(https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2014/02/06/map-where-are-the-trashiest-new-yorkers/).
This picture I took a while ago shows how much as humans, we use our resources very quickly and make a mess of things. This was taken near my High School and it was actually cleaned up just over a month and a half ago as a month and three weeks ago it was actually worse.
To summarize, these are the reasons how waste in the ocean, landfills, and Recycling plants cause lots of pollution all around New York and the fact that some of our health problems come from waste pollution.
