MATTER | ENVIRONMENT Searching for the ultimate example of recycling? Look in the mirror BY CURT STAGER YOU MAY THINK OF YOURSELF as ahighlyrefined and sophisticated creature—and you are. But you are also full of discarded, rejected, and recycled atomic elements. Don’t worry, though—so is almost everyone and everything else. Carbon: Your inky nails Look at one of your fingernails. Carbon makes up — carbon-rich animal tissues, finding their way into half of its mass, and roughly 1 in 8 of those carbon meat and dairy products. Historically, atmospheric atoms recently emerged from a chimney or a tail- carbon dioxide was mainly replenished by volcanoes, pipe. Coal-fired power plants, petroleum-guzzling _ forest fires, and biotic respiration. Today, one quarter of cars, and kitchen gas stoves release carbon dioxide atmospheric CO2 is the result of fossil fuel combustion, into the atmosphere. Each of those waste molecules whether it rose from smokestacks or was displaced is a carbon atom borne on two atomic wings of oxy- from the oceans. (When fossil-fuel CO: dissolves into gen. Fossil-based carbon dioxide molecules that are ocean water, it displaces already-dissolved carbon not soaked up by the oceans or stranded in the upper dioxide derived from natural sources.) And because atmosphere are eventually captured by plants, shorn all of the carbon in your body derives from ingested of their oxygen wings, and woven into botanical sug- organic matter, which in turn obtains it from the atmo- ars and starches. Eventually, some of them end up in sphere, your fingernails and the rest of the organic bread, sweets, and vegetables, while others help form matter in your body are built, in part, from emissions. ILLUSTRATIONS BY YUKO SHIMIZU 16 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015476