Speaker A. I'll probably get a lot of disagreement, but I'll say that the media pressures us into recycling. While I'm willing to take unwanted clothing and books to the local charity shop, I'm not happy to walk or drive far to take bottles, newspapers, tins, batteries to some collection bank. If there was a collection on my doorstep, I would be happy to comply. But why should we spend time and energy doing it ourselves? I mean, my recycling collection bank is miles away from my home.
Speaker B. There is no excuse for not recycling. If you are in the UK, all you have to do is put the stuff in a black box and put it outside every other week. Even the box is given for free. I enjoy recycling. It's not really about saving energy, because it does not, but it's about using things again and again so they don't need to be dumped into a landfill and more trees are not chopped down. Governments also need to make recycling easier.
Speaker C. Recycling becomes a good way of life for those who are not too busy. It is what people have done throughout history. There is a saying — waste not, want not. It was only recently that people in developed countries thought they could live without recycling. I believe it's because buying new things is a lot faster than trying to fix the old ones. When money isn't an issue, people prefer to stop by the store and pick up what they need.
Speaker D. In some ways I agree that we should recycle, but in others I don't. We separate plastic from paper and metal, but the garbage collection person puts them all into one container. Why do we have different boxes then? When I go shopping, I think of carrier bags. Why can't the shops go back to paper bags like they used to do? Most people don't reuse their plastic bags. When I take my bottles to a recycling centre, I pollute the air with car exhaust fumes. For these reasons, recycling is not worth it.
Speaker E. I completely agree with recycling. I think society wastes too much at the moment. I think we should recycle more for our descendants so that there will be enough resources for them. Also, we live in a must-have society, which I am also guilty of. For instance, I own more than 700 DVDs. I rarely watch any of them. They take up unnecessary space in my house and the materials they are made from could have been used for something else.
Speaker F. I think more people would recycle if they could get more money from it. If I was able to take, let's say, all my cardboard to a waste recycling centre and they refunded me per kilo of cardboard, I would naturally try to save all my boxes and turn them in. Another positive way forward is for supermarkets to sell products by the kilo into customers’ own containers. There'd be no wasted packaging and the products would be cheaper.