Does recycling our rubbish really do anything? You hear stories that it is all a farce? And that the process is even more polluting? What actually happens?
Hilda. Woollahra.
Great questions Hilda. Can I step back a few steps and put some other thoughts to you? We live on a planet spinning in space and it is the only one we have. Even though the Earth seems huge to us on a human scale we have been chewing through resources and generating waste products on an industrial scale. Reusing and recycling the waste we generate is a really important thing that we should all do.
Waste products have to go somewhere – the future is really in smarter product design to allow for a more sustainable approach and a different way of thinking about our waste products such that we realise that the empty container that the ‘goods’ came in was also factored into the price structure. We don’t like to throw out the product so why do we think it is a good idea to throw away the materials needed to transport the products to us? They have value and the value needs to be retained, not wasted.
Nature doesn’t produce waste products that are not a food product for some other organism or system. We should look at mimicking this approach so that we waste less of our finite natural resources and less money. Ultimately it is us as consumers who are paying for someone else to make a product and we are paying for their business waste disposal.
Closing the loop and purchasing products that are made with a high recycled material content is a vital step for us. The process is not more polluting, it is less polluting, because for a start you don’t have to go right back to the extraction of the raw materials and all of the processing and transportation phases before you even get the materials to the plant to re-create the goods. A lot less energy is required, a lot less water is consumed, a lot less waste products are produced and a lot less polluted air is pumped out into our atmosphere.
If people are concerned about the stockpiles of waste paper and cardboard that occasionally get built up for example, then if we as consumers choose to buy only or mainly recycled paper products there will be a stronger market for them and the beautiful and ecologically important native forests here and overseas won’t need to be destroyed to make paper to do things like wipe our bot-bots with.
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