Recycling: Part 1

I expect that in the coming months I will be doing a very in-depth study of the way that we recycle things. We, meaning most of urban North America, recycle so many different materials with such a variety of procedures that such a study is simply too much to take on at once. Trying to figure out exactly how to quantify the "goodness" or "badness" of the processes will likely be a complicated task in itself, let alone the collection of data and the subsequent analysis and conclusions. Therefore, I'm going to do a smaller, more manageable study of what we recycle in our every-day blue bins. By excluding the complexities of recycling industrial materials and focusing more on the typical residential materials, the process of analysis will hopefully be more clear and easy to take to the next level.

So, what's in your bin? Probably a number of aluminum cans, some newsprint, a few plastic bottles from water or pop, glass jars, empty cereal boxes, maybe a milk carton or a tetra pack. Even with such a small selection of items, we instantly are dealing with several different materials, all of which require a different type of recycling facility to break them down into their basic parts and make them usable again as a raw material. How much energy is expended in this process? How much of the material is unable to be recycled? Which, of all these typical products uses the least amount of energy to be recycled? Which results in the most usable raw material? Are any of these recycling processes worse than the production of the initial material? I am afraid of what some of this research might uncover.

How many of these recycled items will be made into products or packaging of equivalent value as their pre-recycled form? Unfortunately it is common practise that many materials work through a downward cycle of recycling only to end up in the landfill when they can no longer be used. So we have extended the life of the thing, but not really saved it from its inevitable demise in a heap of garbage on the outskirts of a city. So this is recycling? William McDonough and Michael Braungart call this “downcycling” in their book Cradle to Cradle. I tend to agree: if recycling is supposed to be “closing the loop” (the word cycle is in the word after all) of the lifecycle of materials, then we are not yet entirely sucessful. It might make us all feel better about ourselves, but we really should not be calling this downwardly linear progression cyclic.