Recycling: Does it make a difference?

In most urban cities, recycling bins are abundant and are found in most public buildings. Recycling is considered the right thing to do for the environment. But is recycling really what we should be doing, or is it a stepping stone towards something greater?

We are Living in a Material World
Different end products require different amounts of energy and processing to recycle a product. Certain materials such as aluminum have definite advantages when recycled. The energy to recycle aluminum is 95% less than creating it from raw materials. However, for products like paper, plastic, and glass, it is not necessarily advantageous to recycle the product.

One reason is that the energy and cost to collect and transport the recyclable can be greater than the cost and energy to manufacture the product from raw materials. This of course is partially due to the fact that most environmental costs today are externalized, and the cost of harvesting virgin materials is vastly below the true cost.

However, we must work within the societal and political framework that we currently live in. It means that sometimes it is not economical to transport heavy glass bottles to be recycled when we are able to produce it from raw materials for less.

Location, location, location
The largest factor outside of the material that is recycled is where you are trying to recycle. The first aspect of recycling location is the population density of a given city/town. If there is a high density of people, it means that collection trucks are more efficient and use less energy for transportation per unit mass of recycled material.

The second aspect of location is amount of land available for landfills and how far away from the recyclers it is. Rural areas have access to cheaper land and are able to cheaply discard their otherwise recyclable products. Location is a strong factor in the recycling equation and will ultimately influence the economics of recycling.

The Three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
When most people talk about being environmentally friendly, they will typically look at recycling as a key indicator of "being green". However, this is the wrong approach because there are many other things that are much more efficient than recycling.

In Germany and other countries, they use higher density PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles which can be refilled up to 20 times. The bottles only have to be collected and sanitized before resuse and don't need to be crushed, heated, and reformed for use.

There is a reason that the Three R's are arranged in the order of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Reusing is more important than recycling, and reducing is the best way to be "green". However, unless you are willing to completely withdraw from the consumer society that we are living in, it will be impossible to reduce your impact to nothing. The only way we can "eliminate" our environmental impact is to rethink the way we make things.

Cradle to Grave Paradigm
There is a fundamental problem with recycling. We continue to follow the "Cradle to Grave" paradigm. Yes, we are finding more uses for a product and extending it's life, but in the end it WILL end up in a landfill.

When materials are recycled, the quality (purity, or usefulness) of the product decreases to the point where it eventually must be discarded. One example is pulp fibers. When paper or any pulp products get recycled, the pulp fibers get smaller after each time it is recycled until they are no longer usable and are either burned for energy or sent to a landfill.

Recycling products can be seen as treating the symptoms of a problem, where the actual cause is not being addressed. The only way to solve our problems is to redesign our processes to be "Cradle to Cradle" and in sync with the ecological cycles. Our products should be designed such that the "waste" streams should be the nutrients and input to another system, whether it is the ecosystem or a man-made system. If, and only if, we are able to redesign our products to be "Cradle to Cradle", will we truly be a sustainable society.

My Thoughts
It may seem like I have a negative view about recycling, but in reality I don't. I try to recycle everything that I possible can and I will even carry a can around until I find a recycling bin.

My problem with recycling is that it is not a solution, but instead temporary band-aid to the larger problem. We need to move from a "Cradle to Grave" paradigm towards "Cradle to Cradle". That means that we will have to redesign many (if not ALL) products in our lives so that they will become part of the ecological cycle. (See William McDonough's book Cradle to Cradle)

I encourage all of my readers to continue recycling. But while doing so, think about the other R's. Reuse any products before you recycle them, or better yet, reduce your consumption.

Recommended Books:

• Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things - William McDonough
• The Ecology of Commerce - Paul Hawken
• Entropy: A New World View - Jeremy Rifkin
  
• Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit - Daniel Quinn