Happy Global Recycling Day!

It's the Euro version of America Recycles Day. We should celebrate Global R-Strategy Day instead, and put recycling in its place.

It’s a short post, because I have a class to teach at 3 this afternoon..

Every year on November 15, we have fun with America Recycles Day, the fake holiday brought to you by the plastics, bottling and cigarette industries to pat us on the head for picking up their garbage. It apparently was so much fun that the rest of the world jumped on the bandwagon with Global Recycling Day on March 18.

Their main pitch is one that waste isn’t waste, it’s a resource! It’s an opportunity! The seventh resource, to be precise:

“Of the earth’s natural resources, we tend to think of six as the most important – water, air, oil, natural gas, coal and minerals. These resources represent the foundation of our very existence. All our food, all our sustenance, all our belongings ultimately come from these six elements. Today, humanity can’t survive without them.”

What a bizarre list! How about sunshine, the original source of oil, natural gas, and coal, but also the source of plants, trees, food, and renewable resources. Somehow, it doesn’t make the cut.

The concept of “waste as resource” is clearly popular in Europe, with the President of Coca-Cola Europe saying, “I really believe strongly we don’t have a packaging problem. We have a waste problem and a litter problem. There is nothing wrong with packaging, as long as we get that packaging back, we recycle it, and then we reuse it again.”

Thinking of waste as a resource and opportunity is just another way to make us feel good about single-use plastic. Instead, we should think in terms of R-Strategies. These were first developed in the Netherlands by José Potting et al in 2018. I was not crazy about it starting with R-zero, Refuse; I thought that should be 1, but the idea was evidently that you are starting with zero, nothing, by not making anything.

The first three are all about design. I would have added sufficiency here, but it doesn’t start with R. We do have rethink and reduce.

Then we have the consumption phase, R3 through R7. This is up to us as consumers: keep things going, fix them, share them.

This pushes off the end of life. Recycling is way down the list at R8, as it should be. The only thing worse is R9, Recover, which is a polite way of describing burning waste for energy recovery. As Jeremy Faludi writes in his new textbook, Sustainable Design from Vision to Action, “The last strategy ‘recover’ is incinerating materials for energy recovery. This is even more of a last resort than recycling, but still better than incinerating without energy recovery or landfilling.”

I am not so sure that it is much better than incineration, in that it is a disincentive to do anything between R0 and R7- in Denmark, they have been importing garbage to run their waste-to-energy plants, and burning a tonne of garbage pumps out more CO2 than burning a tonne of coal. Calling it “recover” sounds like greenwashing to me, and I would leave it off the list. That would make recycling the last resort.

I have noted before that the reason our kids are playing with Rocky’s recycling truck is that we have been indoctrinated since we were children that recycling is the ultimate virtue, when it is, in fact, the last resort. We should not be celebrating it.