The pond behind our school was green and empty for years. The number of fish was zero, and nobody could say when they had gone. (11) Our class chose the pond as a project for the whole year. We took out eleven bags of trash in the first week, including a bicycle, a swimsuit and an old bath toy. Then we did the hard part: we stopped putting anything into it and waited. Nothing happened for four months, (12) in May a classmate saw a small snail on a stone. By September there were tiny fish again. (13), nobody put a single animal in that water. We did not build the pond back, (14) we stopped breaking it.
Most of us think about garbage for about three seconds: the time it takes to drop something in a box. (15) A bottle that leaves your hand on Monday may be on a truck on Tuesday, on a ship by the end of the month, and in a field in another country a year later. Recycling is real, (16) it is not a machine that makes things disappear. It costs energy, water and human work, and some materials can only be used again once or twice. (17), the first question is never how to recycle a thing. It is whether the thing needed to exist, (18) that question has to be asked before we buy, not after.