Hamm 1
Ryan Hamm
English 101
Grooms
Paper 1
18 Sept. 2017
Giving Raw Materials Immortality
There has been a common claim that has been circulating regarding our modern waste
epidemic: that there are enough empty plastic water bottles on the earth that when stacked end-
to-end they could reach the moon and back about seven times. Recycling seems to be the easy
answer to the exponentially increasing plastic bottle conflict; although, the tougher question lies
in how these bottles should be recycled. When undesirable objects are chosen to be recycled,
they aren’t just simply recycled. When undesirable objects are chosen to be recycled, there
comes the deciding factor of whether these materials should either be upcycled or downcycled.
Upcycling and downcycling are the two main branches of recycling. While these two methods
share the same foundation, they do contrast each other in a number of ways. They differ from
each other when it comes to their positive and negative aspects, how they transform unwanted
materials into something reusable, and how valuable the finished product is after processing.
When building a house, the foundation is built first and then the walls. The same concept
applies to understanding upcycling and downcycling. In order to best comprehend these two
terms, the metaphorical cement foundation of recycling has to be built first. Recycling can be
defined as: “… [for an object] to pass again through a series of changes or treatments: such as …
to process (something, such as liquid body waste, glass, or cans) in order to regain material for
human use” (“Recycle.”). Recycling is achieved in either smaller or larger quantities. Small–
Hamm 2
scale recycling typically refers to an individual, or a small group of individuals, recycling one,
two, or a handful of objects at a time. Large-scale recycling refers to the act of recycling objects
in the masses at one given time. Recycling in larger or smaller quantities does help our modern
environment in a multitude of ways: it conserves our natural/raw resources that are exponentially
becoming scarcer, it doesn’t add to the landfill, it reduces water pollution, it uses less energy to
create a recycled object than to create a new product, and it creates jobs (“Recycling.”). A
prodigy of recycling that embodies all of recycling’s benefits is the aluminum can, because it
takes “ … 95% less energy to produce a can from recycled material … “ (“Recycling Aluminum
at Highest in Years.”) and because aluminum can be recycled indefinitely. Consequently, in
order to accomplish large-scale recycling, recycling companies have to emit more greenhouse
gases in the process of making a product that isn’t always as good of quality as the original.
