I remember as a kid seeing the recycling logo (the 3 arrows, specifically) for the first time. I was in grade school, if I’m not mistaken. I never used to know what it meant until we had a representative for some environmental agency show up and teach us about how important the three Rs (recycle, reduce, reuse) were.

Fast forward to my late 20s, and here I sit watching a precious part of the world burn uncontrollably, all for our ridiculous consumption of meat.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older, it’s that the Earth matters far more than anyone is willing to believe. And those who believe that it matters are often derided as blindly believing things. It’s a weird and twisted cycle that honestly makes no sense considering the scientific evidence of what’s all going on.

Outside of drastically overhauling your diet, though, we really can take the appropriate steps to help reverse some of the damage we’ve done to the environment. Restoring our planet may take a long time, but it’s possible with the right help from everyone.

And one of the biggest things that needs to happen now is recycling. If the majority of people got on board with recycling, which is honestly such a simple task to carry out on a daily basis, the world would be in a much healthier state within a year. It’s honestly so simple to toss your cardboard boxes and paper waste into one bin, all your plastics into another, and then your glass into a third.

But for whatever reason, people act like it’s some incredibly tough and time consuming chore. All because it’s a little easier to just throw everything in a bin that gets taken out once or twice a week.

In reality, recycling takes little to no extra time, since it’s easy to visually spot which bin you want to throw your waste in. And if it’s food waste, which doesn’t belong in any of the three aforementioned categories, then you should be composting! Composting can even handle the likes of cardboard boxes, too, which can save your paper bin much more room than if you included both.

We need to start making this change here and now. No more putting it off. No more acting like our landfills are an endless abyss. No more being okay with plastics making their way into our oceans to the point of killing all sorts of species, both endangered and otherwise. We have to make a stand by making a change.