|
LITTER
Litter is a very big problem in Northern Ireland. People are either
too lazy to put their litter in the bin or simply don’t care.
There are plenty of litter bins provided by local councils, but
not enough people use them.
Litter looks untidy, costs million of pounds to clean up, attracts
flies and rats and can be very dangerous to people and animals.
Broken glass can cause serious injuries, plastic bags can choke
pets and farm animals, and small animals like mice and shrews get
trapped in bottles and starve to death.
RUBBISH
Litter and rubbish are not the same thing. Litter is in the wrong
place, for example in the street, in the park or in your school
playground. Rubbish is in the right place, in the bin.
Once a week the bin lorry arrives to empty your wheelie bin. The
bin lorry takes the rubbish to a landfill site. The landfill site
is a big hole in the ground into which the rubbish is dumped. Diggers
spread out the rubbish and squash it down. Once the landfill is
full it is covered with soil and the rubbish is buried. Everything
you put in your ordinary wheelie bin goes to the landfill site.
None of it is recycled.
The problem is that all our landfill sites are filling up and nobody
wants a new landfill to be opened near where they live. Landfill
sites are ugly, smelly and cause pollution.
Another problem is that everything we use is made from things taken
from nature. These are called raw materials. For example, paper
is made from wood, so wood is the raw material for paper. To make
new paper we need to cut down more trees for their wood. Sand is
the raw material for glass. If we keep on needing to make more and
more new glass, we will need to keep on digging more and more sand
from nature. Metals are made from special rocks called ores. To
get this raw material we need to quarry or mine the ores, which
causes lots of damage to the environment.
Turning the raw material into the things we need also creates a
lot of pollution.
So what can we do with our rubbish? Well, we can
reduce, reuse and recycle. These are the three R's.
|
