Over the past five years or so, leading solid waste and recycling organizations, communities and businesses across the country have increasingly embraced zero waste. Zero waste policies and programs establish practical ways to eliminate waste and safely reuse, recycle or compost discarded products and packaging. However, there has been confusion in the marketplace due to the many definitions of “zero” that are being used.
As we examine the challenges of the nation’s recycling landscape, it’s good to keep in mind two basic truths: There will always be a huge segment of the population that insists on opportunities to recycle. And recycling is here to stay.
Ideally, a product should find its way into the recycling stream only when it has truly reached its end-of-life. This is why reuse matters so much: Reuse gives a second life to the products we use every day by finding effective and creative ways to utilize, repurpose and distribute them.
Recycling is one of those words that remind us of the famously used phrase from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, which he used to describe his threshold test for obscenity. “I know it when I see it,” Stewart wrote in 1964.
This story originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of Resource Recycling.
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This story originally appeared in the December 2015 issue of Resource Recycling.
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This story originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of Resource Recycling.
Subscribe today for access to all print content.
This story originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of Resource Recycling.
Subscribe today for access to all print content.
Resource Recycling readers may be familiar with the jabs at recycling that came through several editorials distributed nationally recently. It feels like deja vu as we are reminded how these same basic attacks have been recycled over and over in the last 25 years.
Anyone engaged in waste-reduction policy has surely witnessed the intense debate that has been raging for decades around the notion of burning municipal solid waste to create power.
