4 Disturbing Facts to Know About Recycling
If you have a recyclable object that you cannot reuse, repair, or repurpose that you need to discard, recycling is the best option.
Recycling conserves resources (such as fossil fuels, minerals, water, and trees), saves energy, and prevents waste from accumulating in landfills. This makes recycling far better for the environment than sending materials that could be recycled to the dump.
We cannot recycle our way out of our massive waste problem, though. Recycling has its own issues.
1. Recycling Requires Energy
Although it takes far more energy to produce glass, plastic, paper, and metal from virgin materials than recycled materials, recycling does require energy.
Gas-guzzling recycling trucks need to drive around and collect recyclables. The materials then need to be processed. For example, glass and metal need to be melted.
Note: According to Pitt Sustainability, “Recycling used aluminum cans requires only about five percent of the energy needed to produce aluminum from bauxite.” Recycle those cans if you cannot repurpose them!
2. Items are often Downcycled
Ana Pires, Graça Martinho, Susana Rodrigues, Maria Isabel Gomes in Sustainable Solid Waste Collection and Management define downcycling:
“Downcycling is a recycling process where the value of the recycled material decreased over time, being used in less valued processes, with lesser quality material and with changes in inherent properties, when compared to its original use.”
The items created through downcycling are likely to end up in the waste stream. For example, recycled printing paper may become toilet paper, which is not recyclable. Recycled plastic bottles may become fibers for clothing or carpeting.
3. Many “Recyclable” Objects still go to a Landfill
For years, recycling processors in China were recycling about half of the world’s recyclables. China shook the world in January 2018, when it enacted the “National Sword” policy and stopped importing most plastics to be recycled from other countries.
Losing the Chinese market for recyclables means that it is often more cost-effective to send plastics to incinerators and landfills than to recycle them. Many places have reduced the types of plastics they will collect. Some have stopped their plastic recycling programs altogether. Others still collect recyclable plastics but do not recycle them.
Even if it was profitable to recycle plastics, the world outside of China does not have the infrastructure or capacity to keep up with the rate of waste being produced.
“Even before China’s ban, only 9 percent of discarded plastics were being recycled, while 12 percent were burned. The rest were buried in landfills or dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers…experts warn it will exacerbate the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture.”
Yale Environment 360
Are you thinking, “burning takes care of the waste problem?” Remember to consider the consequences of air pollution.
4. Recycling can falsely alleviate concerns about single-use packaging
Recycling can create complacency. We are less likely to avoid single-use packaging if we are reassured that we can recycle it. Similarly, we are less likely to use an object to its fullest potential if we have a guilt-free way to discard it.
We should not allow the ability to recycle to prevent us from remembering and prioritizing the hierarchy of sustainability: refuse/rethink, reduce, reuse/repair, repurpose, and then recycling and rotting.
More importantly than individual consumer behaviors, manufacturers use their products’ recyclability to excuse the mass production of products, like single-use plastic bottles. These products still take raw materials to produce and end up filling landfills and polluting waterways.
Conclusion on Recycling
Always prioritize recycling something over sending something to a landfill. Recycling saves natural resources and energy compared to producing objects from newly extracted resources. In that way, recycling is an essential component of sustainability. That being said, we should not rely on recycling as a solution to our throwaway culture. Instead, we should focus on refusing, reducing, reusing, and repurposing above recycling. Zero-waste lifestyle goals include eliminating waste we send to landfills and minimizing the materials we need to recycle or compost.
Let me know your thoughts about recycling!
Did you learn something from this post? Want to see more content like this? Sign up for our newsletter!
