People don't realize how much they waste our earth's resources every day. It's actually really serious. With a bit of knowledge though I think many people can correct their sloppy habits and turn them into good ones.
Paper
Every piece of paper has two blank sides, yet most of us only use one. If we make an error on a page then our reaction is to just throw out the paper without even thinking of erasing the blemishes or using the other side. We use too much paper to make handouts for a large group of people when we could just hand one copy around for everyone to see. We can also recycle paper or use the scraps for alternative uses. Most people disregard recycling paper entirely and just throw out every piece of scrap paper they ever use. If you think about it, almost everyone uses at least one piece of paper every day. If half of the entire population recycled one piece of paper every day, that would make about 900 billion sheets of recycled paper that could be reused.
Water
Water is the main source of life on earth. We need it every day and we use it for so many different reasons. Water naturally goes through a cycle that brings itself back, but much of it comes back into the ocean turning it into salt water. There is a small percentage of it that also gets turned into acid rain or gets polluted. Many places on earth don't have any fresh water that is available because it is contaminated with deadly bacteria. Places where good, fresh water is available are the places where the people need to be more considering of the people who are less fortunate. We use way too much excess water when we clean our dishes and wash our hands as well as when we take showers or baths. We really don't take into account how much water we really are wasting. It costs a lot of money to desalinize or decontaminate water to turn it into fresh water. This is what many countries need to do to make their water drinkable but they just don't have the money to do it. If we could save more of our fresh water, we could bottle some of it and ship it out to the people who really need it.
Fossil Fuels
The world we have made for ourselves pretty much wouldn't be able to run without fossil fuels. We have made ourselves completely reliant on burning oils, gases, and coal for most of our earths energy. There are many natural sources of energy that we don't even think to take advantage of, such as wind, solar, and hydro power. We can do so many things to cut down on the use of fossil fuels, but it will definitely take time and money. The big reason that we don't want to make the change to using natural sources of power is because universal change costs a whole lot of MONEY. If money wasn't a factor than I'm sure people would be thrilled to make the change, but any giant universal change such as this would put countries in big debt. It costs money to build wind turbines, solar panels, and hydro turbines. And then you have to pay people to install them. I think that everyone should look at the bigger picture and really think about what we are doing to our environment by burning all of these fossil fuels. I think that the time for a big change is now before we dig ourselves into too deep a hole.
Fresh Produce
We are very stupid when it comes to keeping our food fresh. Most of the time we throw out good produce because we think it's rotten when in fact it is still plenty edible. There are two bad things about this habit. One, you are wasting lots of food that could have been made into a tasty dish, and two, you are wasting a whole bunch of money because all you are going to do is go back the grocery store and buy more produce and waste it again. This is a vast cycle of you losing your own hard earned money. Keep all of your produce refrigerated for a longer life span. Make sure all of your produce is in a bag or closed container to make it last longer. If something is pretty close to getting old, make something out of it rather than throwing it out. Americans through out billions of pounds of edible food every year. We don't want to keep follow in that path.
Plastic Bottles and Soda Cans
Most of the United States offers to pay you $.05 for every bottle or can of a carbonated drink that you recycle. If people recycle all of the bottles and cans that they use then they would actually get a pretty good sum of money. They would also bet helping out the environment. The problem is that many people don't do this, they just throw out there cans and bottles. When the cans and bottle are thrown out they get buried in land fills and they don't decompose for years. Last year it was estimated that if all the thrown out cans were collected and recycled that all of the melted down metal could be remade into a dozen B-52 jet planes. That's pretty amazing if you think about it. And for plastic bottles, they can easily be reused over and over by just washing them out. You can just put them in the dishwasher, take them out and reuse them. But when it comes time that they have gotten too old, then you can recycle them so they can be melted down and be made into more bottles. Recycle, recycle, recycle!
