Blog 3

Dear Nevada State Assembly,

I’m writing this letter in regards to the current waste of food products across the state. In the U.S. alone there is an estimated $218 billion worth of food wasted annually, and with new laws regarding waste management and proper recycling of food in Nevada we could not only reduce the carbon footprint of Nevada. However this solution sadly costs more as the landfills in Nevada are quite large and are projected to not fill for centuries.

In a landfill, the non-recycled food waste starts to decompose anaerobically due to the lack of oxygen, this process releases methane gases into the atmosphere, helping speed along global warming. Among the carbon emissions, landfills also host a variety of rodents who carry diseases to humans, potentially endangering the population. As of 2010, landfills account for 16.2% of all carbon emissions across the nation, while this number may seem insignificantly small, without those carbon emissions the amount of greenhouse gasses we trap in the atmosphere could severely reduce the progress of global warming,  and we could be the first stepping stone towards a better world.

The effects of global warming can seem far away from our own community, as the whole world is much larger than one region on it. However, global warming affects everything on the planet, every flora, every fauna, every region, and as such we should be doing the most we can to stop the damage we're doing to the atmosphere, one step at a time. I believe that one of the first steps we could take would be to neutralize the threat that the landfills we currently have holds over the environment.

One possible way to start enforcing this is stricter laws regarding recycling, which would prevent compostable food from ending up in landfills, as well as creating new uses for papers, plastics, and metals, which can be prevented from burning and ruining the environment further. While every American home is guilty of throwing away around 1 pound of compostable food away, restaurants are a large portion of compostable waste in landfills. By writing and passing a law that prevents wastefulness such as this, we could largely reduce the amount of waste that is thrown into landfills each day. This not only applies to the restaurants, but to households as well, while we may not be the largest state in terms of population, by enforcing new recycling laws, we can greatly reduced the American carbon footprint, and start the long road towards recovery of our planet.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this letter, I firmly believe that we could be the motivational source needed to kick start the path towards the betterment of the planet. With laws enforcing recycling, we could begin fixing the damage to the planet we've caused, and by removing the homes of rodents, effectively remove potentially dangerous diseases from our region. I hope that you take this letter into consideration, and hopefully formulate new laws.

Sincerely,

Zach Rundell