Has Recycling Jumped the Shark?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 04. 8.07
Where we live, the City government is thinking about charging to take away our garbage. We already recycle like mad, and put out far less garbage per person than most other cities, but as Robert Ouellette points out at ::ReadingToronto, changing how we pay for it isn't the issue.
"All garbage is bad garbage. There is no effective way to rid the environment of our trash. The only real answer is to not make it in the first place."
Chemist and author Paul Palmer goes much farther and suggests that recycling is dead. He says It has "become lazy, relying on yesterday's methods and advancing no new ideas to inspire the public. The practitioners have become used to income derived from the low grade collection of garbage. Their method is to pick away at garbage streams recapturing small amounts of smashed up lowgrade materials. Alternatively they profit by exacting garbage dumping surcharges, resembling guilt taxes, from the dumpers.....The currently operative theory of recycling contemplates the continual, even perpetual collection of garbage and then attempts to find innovative ways to reuse the maximum part of that garbage. In the current jargon, recycling is an end-of-pipe theory. Because end-of-pipe approaches are necessarily inefficient and difficult (since products were never designed for reuse) the best that recycling is able to hold out for in most cases is destruction of products after one use (through smashing, chopping, grinding, etc.) and the laborious recapture of only the bare materials. "
Palmer proposes zero waste as the answer.
"The basic problem that has always plagued recycling is that it accepts garbage creation as fundamental. Zero waste strategies reject garbage creation as a failure, actually an abomination that threatens the planet, an historical accident, a politically motivated defect in the design of our industrial-commercial system of production. Zero waste actually goes deeper in that it rejects waste of every kind at every stage of production. Zero waste demands that all products be redesigned so that they produce no waste at all and furthermore, that the production processes (a kind of product in themselves because they too are carefully designed) also produce no waste. Zero waste at no point interfaces with garbage but rather simply looks beyond it. In the theory of zero waste, once all waste is eliminated, there will be no garbage, no need for any garbage collection, no garbage industry and no dumps. All that superstructure of garbage management will fade away as simply irrelevant."
Read the entire article here by Paul Palmer in ::Rachel's Democracy & Health News He is also author of ::Getting to Zero Waste
You know this is a big issue when even Margaret Wente jumps on it. "If you want to be a good environmental citizen, it is no longer enough to recycle, compost, and write a cheque to the World Wildlife Fund. You've got to strive to shrink your footprint. The ideal is to waste no energy and produce no waste. As one trend-watcher says, “Zero is the new black.” ::Globe and Mail
image from ::Daily Dose of Imagery
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In that order.
HA! Not laughing at the topic here, recycling is important, just laughing because I read the title and though "that sounds like Lloyd Alter" and sure enough it is! Good title :)
The idea always was "reduce, reuse, recycle", but obviously not having to reuse in the first place would work.
The reality is that Recycling is big business, if it makes sense or not.
One example (I could think of right now) is paper. The recycling really doesn't seem to do a lot for the environment:
1. It has to be collected,.
2. It has to be sorted.
3. It has to be broken down
4. It has to be seperated from the ink etc.
5. It is made into new "paper products" which aren't always of the same quality as new ones because the paper fibres are usually shorter due to the breakdown of the old paper.
It's not like Paper is a laborous and toxic process (if they don't use chlorine as the bleaching ingrident, but that goes for recycled too), and trees DO grow up.
From what I know about paper recycling buying new may be more environmentally friendly than all the crap that needs to be done to get useful paper out of my old newspaper.
Instead of buying ourselves "guilt free" by recycling, we should consider this truly as a last resort approach, but I don't hold my breath on this one.
I would say reuse is the key!
Recycling is good no question, but I agree, it has gotten to the point, where people do not think any more about the way products are packed. I can still remember days when costumers would bring their own plastic boxes to buy cheese.
Here is Mexico, people do not have the money to easily spend it on plastic wrapping, so when you say no bag - they appreciate this! And if there is a natural way of packing something everyone will do it - is there anything more genius than a tamale having the reused corn leaves as a wrap!
In countries like Mexico, people do not have the resources to just buy a new one, when the old one is broken - and you cans till get spare parts for all kind of things! That's what we need back everywhere! And people, who use their creativity to make new things from used things – like whine bottles who become drinking glasses or building materials – because as long as we can afford it, we will still buy. But by making the circles smaller we will increase our impact.
Zero waste should be the prime goal.
It's what past civilizations were built on - very few people in the past could afford to be wasteful.
Now many of us live in a resource rich world and we've failed to adapt.
There's still one more step to make here.
That is to create products that are not only resource efficient but durable too.
We are addicted to disposable goods that are or of poor quality and unrepairable if broken.
Often very minor changes in design would enable components to be replaced or repaired with ease.
Perhaps the green movement could learn to praise the well designed as much as as the eco- manufactured.
Perhaps consumer should learn to buy less and pay more.
There is a good deal more on the subject of really digging into ZERO WASTE at this website www.zerowasteinstitute.org