Raúl Santos
Whenever I speak with someone about trash and waste on our society of mass consumption, recycling usually comes up as the answer to the problem.
This is starting to worry me, because recycling is not the magical solution for all the problems caused by our excessive waste and trash.
Let me elaborate:
What those people think when they answer like that, is that it’s OK to produce more and more trash, because it can be recycled. They think that it’s OK to have little tiny plastic sheets separating each cheese slice when they buy a cheese pack at the supermarket; they think that it’s OK for each person to throw to the bin, every day, two, three or four Nespresso capsules; they think it’s OK to eat everyday at the mall and throw away the plastic straw, and the plastic wrap that it came in, and the chips’ plastic packet, and the hamburguer package, and the plastic cup where their drink came in, and the tiny plastic coffee cup…
Short version: they think it’s OK to use and abuse our planet’s resources, because we can recycle afterwards.
But recycling has it’s environmental costs, too, and it’s not 100% efficient. For instance, in order to recycle paper, several chemicals are used for bleaching, which are nasty pollutants. And even without bleaching, there’s energy and other chemicals being spent.
Does this mean that we shouldn’t recycle? No, absolutely not! Recycling is fundamental for the preservation of the environment but it’s not a lifebuoy and it’s not a magic bullet for our (bad-) habits of mass consumption.
Recycling does not exist so that we can continue to produce and spend our planet’s resources in an uncontrolled way; recycling exists so that when we need to produce something, we don’t need to extract more natural resources, and instead use those that have already been extracted, thus minimising the environmental impact of that production.
To make sure this is clear, here’s an example: recycling doesn’t exist so that we can have those paper tissues on our lunch trays on the mall; recycling exists so that books can be printed without having to chop down more trees besides those that were already chopped down to produce the paper that gets recycled.
Remember the three R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. And notice that Recycle comes last…