Photo: A landfill I visited, note the perfectly useful children's bench, and deck chairs. If we tried hard enough, I'm sure that we would find that most of the items we discard would be useful to somebody else. One person's trash is another person's treasure, isn't that right?
In my highschool days, I would focus myself obsessively on nudging people to recycle as much as possible. From boisterous skits in front of the school to public dives into garbage cans in front of my much amused classmates, I was obsessed with getting each and every discarded can, bottle and plastic wrapper into the recycle bin.
What I overlooked though was the two preceeding R's, reduce and reuse. Recycling is of great importance, but reducing and reusing should come first. Why? Because prevention is better than cure. Its better of us to stop consuming the things that need recycling in the first place. Recycling uses a great deal of energy to transform those discarded plastics into useful items that we can use like fleece-based clothing and recycled plastic benches. But, remember that not all of what we throw into the bin can get recycled due to a variety of factors. Consider cross-contamination, in public buildings, if a recycling bin is "contaminated" with carelessly tossed garbage, it becomes innefficient for maintenance staff to sort through and remove the garbage, resulting in perfectly good reycleables being tossed. Also, recycling takes a lot of transferring, from the bins to the trucks, to the recycling plants and sorting bins within these plants. Its inevitable that some recycleables get lost along the way, be they dropped from forklifts or blown from that blue bin on the end of the curb.
If we are to focus our efforts, it has far more positive impact to put them towards first reducing and reusing. This should be intuitive, when we reduce consumption, we reduce the resources being taken from the earth. Hopefully, this can also translates into financial savings. As a student, take the coffee a day as an example. An average cup costs about $2 (although there are far fancier and more expensive caffeine fixes on the market) if consumed daily before classes, that amounts to $10 a week, and roughly $30 a month. These little things add up on the wallet, not to mention all of those disposeable cups along the way.
Reusing is also a much-overlooked yet highly enjoyable R. When you reuse something, be it clothing, pop bottles or the desk your neighbor put out on the curb, you are not only reducing your need to consume, but you are repurposing that item in a way that is far less energy-intensive than recycling. My company prides itself on re-using. Two of our products feature reused items. Our bicycle trailers use wood from discarded pallets while our small and mini vermicomposters use plastic buckets which are non-recycleable in Kingston (Apparently, #2 grade plastic is not recycled). To find new and useful ways to reuse items that may be discarded around the house, I would highly recommend instructables a great website for all kinds of Do-it-yourself projects. A company now famous for reusing is TerraCycle Inc, which uses pop bottles to package its fertilizer products, cookie wrappers to make backpacks and single-use grocery bags to make stronger reusable bags. With a little ingenuity, a lot of what we would throw out into the garbage or blue bin can be repurposed for re-use.
Now, although I emphasize the first two R's I still firmly believe that recycling is of great importance. Energy intensive as it is, it enables us to reuse discarded and otherwise "worthless" materials (like last week's newspaper) for more useful products (like today's newspaper). It helps companies looking for raw resources find materials that are not extracted new from the environment. It is of utmost importance that we recycle as much as possible as there is simply no excuse for recycleable water bottles and aluminum cans going to the landfill instead of a recycling plant. However, just remember if you (like me) decide to run a recyclying blitz and to dive into dumpsters in order to save a can or two, that you do not forget yourself the importance of those first two R's, they're ahead of recycling for a reason after all!
