Many sources indicate that many countries have enforced strict laws when it comes to recycling, which prove to greatly impact the percentage on how much waste gets recycled. Unfortunately, North America has not followed in these footsteps, but can be changed.

According to Google, Germany has the best recycling rates of 56% of everything recycled every year, while producing 30 million tonnes of waste every year. Their method to recycling is “The Green Dot System” The concept is that the consumers are able to see if a company is also taking responsibility of paying for recovering the waste and recycling it. This concept makes companies try to minimize their resources in packaging so that they do not have to pay these fees. When this concept was put into order, Germany reduced their Waste production by one million tonnes per year.

This method could be a good way for North America to improve the recycling system here, and decrease the sizes of our landfills gradually.

A thing that positively affected my environmental ethic:

A thing that has negatively affected my environmental ethics:

Key Question: What would an ethic of care towards the environment look like?

1. What would be needed to create it?                                                                                                                      In order to create an ethic of care, people would need to actually care more about the environment, by ensuring we do not harm it.
2. What would we have to believe about the environment? How should we see it?                                       We should see that the environment is what allows all living things to exist on our planet, and if destroyed, pieces of life will also be destroyed.
3. How would we act?                                                                                                                                       We would be more careful about how we’re affecting the environment. For example, we would litter significantly less, as littering has caused a lot of issues to the environment. We would also be more careful about polluting our air.
4. What would be different about the world if everyone adopted this ethic of care towards the environment? Benefits and drawbacks?                                                                       If we stopped littering as much, we would be able to begin to clean our planet from previously littered materials and improve the habitats for the wild life. However, if we were to apply stricter laws for pollution, many people could lose their jobs due to factories being shut down for polluting too much.
5. Should we adopt an ethic of care towards the environment?                                                      I would say yes, because the environment is what we depend on for life, and if we destroy it, then we will not be able to continue for much longer.