I recommend you actually do your own research on the subject. Although I have done enough to convince me our planet is desperately in need I don't have the statistics for you. I can tell you that it takes 7lbs of grain for every 1lb of meat, and that the US wastes alot of meat every year.
I can tell you that its expected that at the rate we are going at we will experience shortages of fresh water. Many animals cannot survive in salt water, that will mean the extinction of many animals, yet people do nothing to conserve water!
The laws of competition tell you that the fewer people you are competing with the more likely you are to have more. We only have one earth, and that earth can only provide so much!
By reducing what we use we are straining our resources less.
Let me put it to you like this. If you made $1600 a month, would you be better off with one child or 3? (NO GOVT ASSISTANCE FIGURED IN)... also if you bought that child pre-used clothing or shopped sales and clearances you would be better off right (reducing), and if you were able to get a free crib from your sister who just had a baby you would save money (reusing), and lastly if you could resell the items once your baby out grew them it would help you out (recycling). Applying it to money and kids does it make it clearer? Everything has limits, the earth cannot supply endlessly, not all resources are renewable... by reducing, reusing, and recycling we are saving our resources!
everything you throw away on the streets ends up in the ocean. plastic doesn't biodegrade, which means nothing ever destroys it. It just turns into itsy bitsy pieces and fish confuse it with food and eat it then die. Plastic affects birds, turtles<3, fish, and all marine life because animals eat other animals for food.
you should watch this video about plastic, it's only a minute and it is really sad.
for our survival
There is something called a resource, and something called a reserve. A resource is everything of that substance on the Earth. A reserve is what we can currently access. Like how oil is a resource, but what we can get, what we know exists, is the reserve. The same principle works with metals, and by following the three R's, we can save digging out more of this limited resource, and use less energy along the way. Almost everything in the process needs fossil fuels to run in some way or another, like transportation for example, and recycling can reduce the total energy needed to make a final product. By recycling you can skip the ore processing step, and in the case of paper, you can skip the cutting trees part. In this way, you do less damage to the environment, while still being able to use what you need to some degree.
Because it's better for the environment. If we recycle it means we don't have to take as much raw material to produce the things we need. It also means we have less waste to dispose of.
