So, I hope this works. So, raise your hand if you think we should recycle more. Great, okay. Well, I don't.
We all get a satisfactory feeling when we toss an item in the blue bin. We recycle a lot of times because we feel guilty about consuming. But today, I urge you to stop recycling. I grew up on the island of Taiwan, a country that is one-sixth the size of Utah but with eight times the population.
That's nearly 50 times the population density. When I first moved to this country, my first major culture shock was at a tailgating event in Kentucky. In my 12-year-old mind, I couldn't believe that food and recyclables could ever be in the same container.
I was so used to having to wash and stack pudding containers and memorizing half a dozen types of recycling in elementary school. I remember only seeing tiny matching trash bags at the same street corner every single day as people gathered there and waited for the garbage truck to arrive. Here's an example of how people recycle and dispose of their trash and type. The Taiwanese version of a musical truck isn't for ice cream. Instead, it's for a trash pickup.
You might be wondering why someone who grew up in a country with one of the world's most efficient recycling systems and nearly 70% in Taipei will be standing here in Utah where we recycle less than 3% of our waste, saying that we should just completely ditch recycling. The thing is, a lot of the recycled materials are actually not being recycled. Things we put in our curbside recycling bins aren't necessarily making it to the recycling plant. Our recycling system is broken.
Ever since China announced that they won't take any more of our recycled goods, Ogden City's recycling raised from $39 to $53. Because of this, Ogden actually suspended its entire recycling program for two weeks in March. There's still no long-term contract for Ogden City's recycling plant, and this is not a regional problem.
These CDs are not biodegradable, so it takes over 1 million years for them to decompose. E-waste is becoming... a bigger and bigger problem in our society due to rapid changes in technology. Each year, around 15 million tons of textile waste is produced, and 90% of that goes straight to our landfill, filling up over 5% of the space there. Small fabric pieces like this are especially hard to recycle.
On the same note, small plastic pieces like these are typically not recycled, since most plastic vary in composition, color, transparency, size and weight, recycling plastic pieces become very confusing and that explains why a lot of these pieces end up in the landfill. Saturating material recovery facilities or MRFs with non recyclables can increase sorting costs only to have the materials be sent to the landfill anyway. This is called contamination. Some common examples of contaminants are unwashed plastic and disposable coffee cups. Similarly, if you put yard waste in your recycling bin, it makes the surrounding items wet and hard to recycle.
If you put metal in your recycling bin, there's a chance that it might break the machine at the facility, which increases the cost as well as the time. In the three R's we all know, reduce, reuse, recycle. We talked about recycle, or the lack of, and we're also familiar with reduce.
If we use less stuff, less stuff goes to the landfill. So what about the one that's in the middle? What do we use?
Instead of reduce, reuse, recycle, let's focus on reduce and break it down to the four R's. Reimagine, rethink, recreate, and reevaluate. Instead of seeing those fabric pieces I showed earlier as something that goes in the trashcan, Reimagine them being your new favorite toy or display. Rethink projects you can use making these materials. Say your favorite animal is a dinosaur.
Recreate your style of it using only fabric scraps and reclaimed materials. Re-evaluate the impact. and the difference that you can make at home.
Reimagine the future where art truly is for everyone. Rethink waste as viable art materials. Recreate art to alleviate poverty.
Re-evaluate your impact against climate change and environmental racism. This is creative reuse. Creative reuse is a process of transforming waste materials and unwanted items into new, exciting, useful, and fun products. It requires innovative thinking, problem solving, and product.
testing to make use of reclaimed materials. Creative reuse will fill the gap with the driving goal of maximum impact on the people and minimum impact on the environment. Creative reuse keeps material inside the loop and invites everyone to work together in harmony to celebrate offcuts, oddities, and found objects.
Strive to redefine everyday objects as material for art making and work to share that idea. Exposure to art education alleviates poverty and there's compelling research to support this. The deputy director of Learning First Alliance wrote about closing the achievement gap.
Research has shown that arts prepares students to succeed in work, school, life, and beyond by boosting math and literacy achievement, developing creativity and critical thinking skills, strengthening perseverance, facilitating cross-cultural understanding, and much much more. Salt Lake City and Valley is a very young population. fast-growing community with a very young population. The opportunity and the need to reshape how we think about waste is critical. With harmful environmental effects of inversion and others clearly seen for Salt Lake Valley residents each day, we need to invest in the solution for all of us.
Creative reuse is one of the solutions and you can visit a creative reuse center at these states and locations. Now raise your hand if you think we we should recycle less and reuse more. Thank you.