Someone else will do it. My contribution wouldn’t help anyways. These are common thoughts that people have about taking care of the Earth. If I had no money constraints, I would seek to use my money to change the mindsets of the people about taking care of the environment in order to make a lasting impact on the health of the world. The way I would do this is by offering money to every person who recycled. For each properly sorted recycling bin, the individual or company would receive $100.  Furthermore, for people who do not care about earning extra money, I would put a high tax on each garbage can that included recyclable materials. I believe that this would encourage people to recycle everything because everyone wants to earn extra money and certainly does not want to lose money. 

How does recycling help the environment? By recycling and reusing materials including plastics, paper, glass, and aluminum, the need for extracting, refining, and processing these raw materials is decreased. All of these processes substantially contribute to air and water pollution. This helps save energy, reducing carbon dioxide emissions and contributing to climate change reduction. In addition, recycling prevents excess waste from being sent to landfills. For example, plastic can take up to 500 years to decompose, and even then, it does not fully disappear. Lastly, recycling prevents garbage from collecting in the ocean in areas such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the north-central Pacific Ocean. OECD estimates that 75 to 199 million tons of plastic waste are in the ocean as of this year, and this figure is expected to increase exponentially in the years to come. This can cause entanglement, death, injury, and suffocation of marine animals among other issues. It is clear that recycling has a variety of benefits for the environment.

In conclusion, recycling is an easy way to help contribute to the environment, and offering payments to encourage people to recycle is the perfect way to take a step toward solving climate change. Once people see the impact of the majority of people recycling, their mindsets about helping the environment would change because they would believe that they should and can make a difference.