Recycling revisited

[theotherhermit]

I'm very much in favor of recycling. I recycle everything I can, and encourage my family and friends to do so as well. Every day after work I search our trash bins for recycleables, and I'm trying to persuade our company to install recycling bins in our lobby.

However, I've recently learned that while recycling is a better option than landfilling or burning, it is not the panacea it is often portrayed. Participating in a recycling program can give us the comfortable (and false) feeling that we’ve solved our waste problem, and that it’s fine to go on buying plastic bottles of soda and printing reams of paper. Actually, recycling should be a better-than-nothing last resort after we’ve already tried reducing and reusing.

One major problem with recycling is that it doesn’t cut down on the amount of waste produced. And even if we recycle everything that we possibly can, most of that waste eventually ends up in an incinerator or landfill. Sometimes it’s sooner than we think. A good many of the things we collect for recycling never get recycled at all, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the collection gets dumped or burned because there is no market for the reprocessed stuff, which is usually of lower quality and sometimes costs more than virgin material. This may happen close to home, or it may happen after the material has been shipped to an overseas processing plant. If it is discarded there, it may be deposited in an unlined and unmanaged dump, causing more soil and water contamination than it would have had it stayed here.

Contamination is another reason that recyclables sometimes get dumped. Plastics are particularly susceptible; one stray bottle of the wrong composition can ruin an entire batch during the processing, causing that lot to be discarded.

Recycled material does not, as I used to believe, emerge as good as new, nor does it embark on an eternal cycle of reincarnation. With the exception of some metals, recycled substances (even glass) are invariably of lower quality than they were in their original state. They eventually reach a degraded state in which they can no longer be used. This is especially true of plastics. A large portion of virgin material must be added to the weaker recycled product in order to make it usable. This is why we seldom see items that claim to be made of anything approaching 100% post-consumer recycled material. It is also why many recycled materials get reused only once. Recycled plastic is most commonly used to make things like fleece and synthetic lumber, which usually cannot be recycled when they wear out.

In addition to all these problems, there is the issue of the energy used and the pollution created during reprocessing. For instance, melting and remaking plastic bottles takes far more energy, and creates far more waste, than washing and reusing glass bottles, as soda producers in some countries still do. Plastic bottles, used briefly and tossed into the recycling bin, must be collected and transported to the processing center, which is sometimes in another country. There energy and water are used to process the stuff, after which it must travel back to the plant where more energy will be used, and more waste created, to remake it. Many recycling methods produce toxic wastes which must then be disposed of. At out-of-country recycling facilities (and sometimes in my country as well) these wastes may be discarded in a less than environmentally sound way.

Given all these problems, is it worthwhile to recycle at all? It most definitely is. The US EPA lists many reasons for recycling, all of which are still true. (See the United States Environmental Protection Agency webpage on recycling at http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/rrr/recycle.htm.) Recycling keeps some of our waste out of landfills and incinerators, and reprocessing it takes less energy, creates less waste, and uses less natural resources than producing all new products.

Nevertheless, we must not allow our recycling efforts to give us a false sense that “all’s right with the world”. Recycling must be made more efficient and effective. We can contribute to that by being conscientious in our rinsing and sorting, by buying products with recycled content, and by letting companies know that we want more recycled content in their products or packaging. Industries can be given incentives to recycle the waste produced in manufacturing, which accounts for far more garbage than municipal post-consumer waste. Laws can be passed which require manufacturers to use certain percentages of recycled material, and which make them more accountable for the true cost, in energy, waste, and natural resources, of the virgin materials they use.

In the end, though, even a highly efficient recycling strategy can accomplish only so much. I believe we should be taking a serious look at cutting back on production and consumption, and at reuse. Do we really need to drink all those sodas? Could our soda bottling companies be encouraged to return to the use of reusable bottles? How many Barbie dolls do our children need? Could Barbie’s package be made with less plastic? Could we use the library more frequently, and buy fewer new books? Does our bar soap need to be wrapped in both paper and plastic? We should be asking ourselves these, and many similar, questions.

If you'd like to learn more about recycling, or about dealing with trash in general, I recommend Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers (New York: The New Press, 2005). That sounds disgusting, I know, but it really is a fascinating read!

[Amanda]

Thank you for posting this! So few people seem to know about this. The phrase is reduce, reuse, THEN recycle. It is, as you say, the last step and a last resort. First we need to use less, then reuse what we have, and only then recycle. "Throw out" shouldn't even be part of the process if we designed things correctly.

Many countries use glass bottles and refill them. Heck, we do that with beer. We need to reexamine everything we produce and consider its entire life cycle, and change it from cradle to grave to cradle to cradle. Our current method is not sustainable, and I for one would still like to have a healthy planet when I'm older.