Reduce, Reuse, THEN Recycle

Many people rightly criticize the environmental movement for its near fanatic emphasis on recycling. The recycled material must be collected, processed, and reclaimed, costing time, money, and energy. Recycling may not pay economic or even energy benefits in the near term versus newly harvested resources. This can and will change as new materials become more scarce and the price/energy balance is adjusted, meaning that collecting/storing material for later recycling is still a big win. The even more important point, however, is that recycling is the end of the chain and its least important link, not the beginning.

The Forest Behind the Tree

Recycling programs, even if they are not of immediate and direct economic benefit, like currently idle Texas oil wells, stockpile a resource for a time when the economic and energy trade-offs will make them competitive. Designing products and services, buying those products with an eye toward their future recyclability, is more than sensible. Over the last ten years more projects have become economically viable as resource costs have gone up. Newspaper-to-cat-litter programs, turning paper waste into absorbent pellets, is one of the programs which is a going concern in our area.

The issue often missed is that recycling is only one small aspect of what, just a generation or two ago, many people would have thought of as a larger philosophy of general reuse. Understanding this issue is critical to getting the most out of recycling and getting onto the path of true energy and resource independence.

The full process of which recycling is just a part is easily summarized: Reduce, Reuse, then Recycle. Recycling is the last step in this process after everything else has had its go.

Reducing Consumption, Eliminating Waste

Reducing consumption is the first and most obvious step. Energy or materials never consumed do not have to be reclaimed. This does not mean sacrifice and a return to 1800's technology, although certainly in times of recession or energy crunch, people are more than willing to give up many frills and look back to older times. Typically however, this involves a combination of looking back, looking forward, and simply looking around. We get so caught up in the tools and conveniences of today that we forget older ways of doing things, ways that are often more efficient and less wasteful for particular tasks, like dragging out a chainsaw to cut down a sapling, or the people I knew who would drive a car for a commute of literally 300 feet. Looking forward involves finding new processes or materials which reduce waste and increase durability, like poured rubberized-concrete studs in modular housing. Looking around means thinking outside the box, noticing opportunities, bringing together old and new to make something better, and figuring out what can be combined or simply done without.

Waste is waste and should be eliminated. Cutting waste in one area opens up opportunities for reduced cost, luxury, and convenience in others. Spend it where it counts.

In industry, co-generation is great example of this: When generating electricity, why work to cool the steam back down when you are making steam somewhere else to drive a chemical process?

The average person can do this in many places:

• Eliminate redundancy. Those same people I knew who would drive that short distance to work would then take time out of their day to work out and get exercise. People take the elevator at work and use a Stairmaster™ at home.
• Replace disposable with permanent. Carry a reusable bag to the grocery store instead of using plastic bags which tear and dump your groceries. Save up to buy a more expensive but more durable pair of shoes instead of a new pair every year.
• Get rid of packaging. Individually wrapped items often cost more in terms of their packaging than their contents. How much energy and resources goes into a head of lettuce versus the plastic wrapped around it? What is the resource savings between one 25 pound bag of oatmeal versus 25 cardboard cartons?
• Perform tasks at appropriate times and places. Grill outside during the summer instead of heating your kitchen just to cool it down again. Do work that needs light during the day outside or in well-lit rooms.
• Look at lifestyle changes that cost less without reducing your quality of life (or even increase it). How about playing cards and talking with your family instead of watching TV? Living where you work? Spending a few hours on a weekend to make several homemade meals for the week instead of using frozen meals? Having a dinner in for friends instead of eating out (feed 10 people for the cost of 3)?

These are all ways to make sure that energy and waste is never generated and therefore never needs to be reclaimed. They also tend to make you more self-reliant and can actually improve your quality of life by connecting you with family, friends, and community.

This step is absolutely critical to any attempt to gain energy independence? Why? Because as soon as any gain is made in efficiency or productivity, it is absorbed by consumption. If the mileage of cars doubled today, the number of miles they would be driven would double just as quickly. Without a change in attitude, any scientific or technological gains will quickly be devoured by the culture of waste. On the opposite side, controlling waste gives us more time and space to explore opportunities and make better long-term decisions about energy and production.

Reusing: Why Bother Recycling?

When environmentally conscience people look at an empty bottle, they think about a recycling bin. The fact is that the bottle can have a much longer life before it even sees the inside of that bin, and each use eliminates the material needed for a new bottle without the high energy cost of melting it back down. Many products made today are not made well enough to reuse easily, but putting some thought into your purchases can get much mileage, and a little creativity can make new uses out of almost anything. As a backlash from the Depression, anything reused or homemade is culturally devalued: it reminded people of poverty and drove us to a cycle of quick fixes and easy consumption. Reversing that trend is hard but useful, profitable, and even fun.

This can also be seen on an industrial scale: Why not make drywall from the lyme slurry used to remove SOx and NOx from your flue gas? Gunpowder is made from the glycerin created as a by-product of industrial soap-making. Waste products are an opportunity, not a problem.

On a smaller scale, the possibilities are literally endless and depend on your lifestyle, but one of the best things is that after something has been reused a few times, it can still be recycled. Here are some of the things we do or have done:

• Buy milk in reusable (with a deposit) glass bottles.
• Reuse plastic grocery bags for trash and for sale at markets.
• Reuse egg cartons for your own chickens, your neighbor or friend's chickens, or take them to one of the small farm coops or stores that reuses them.
• Empty commercial frosting containers make great long-term grain storage. Ice cream buckets are great too, along with ammo boxes and crates.
• Reuse empty food containers and refill them from bulk purchases.
• Stale bread, a little bit of seasoned cooking oil, and a frying pan makes croûtons. Seasoned bread crumbs are easy too. Slightly past-its-prime milk makes ricotta or paneer cheese in any kitchen. Slight souring is the first step in most cheese making.
• Old clothing goes into the convenient rag bag in the kitchen— clean rags go in one end and come out the other. We use very few paper towels and rags too soiled to easily clean are just thrown away (where they were going anyway).
• Cotton tee-shirts and blue jeans are ripped or cut into strips to make rag rugs or boiled and sterilized for vet-rap. They can also be used for filters (wax/grease).
• Knit wool sweaters can be unraveled for their yarn or felted and cut for quilting.
• Old adult clothes can be modified into child-size clothes. Child clothes (which they grow out of instantly) go to the next kid in the extended family.
• Plastic soda bottles, with the addition of a cheap commercial nipple, become rabbit waterers. They also are great for deep-garden irrigation.
• Some metal cans make decent candle molds. Bulk metal olive-oil containers are great for dipping tapers.
• Two-pound metal cans can make chicken waterers, cheese-presses, and artistic half-round lanterns.
• Wood ash can be leached for its lye (potassium hydroxide) for soap, biodiesel, or as a compost additive in place of lyme.
• Reuse bailing twine to bundle kindling.
• Reuse candle-ends and broken crayons in new candles.
• Get a kitchen grease can to filter your kitchen oil. Reuse it once or twice before getting rid of it. Some used kitchen oils can be used in biodiesel, to pre-soak charcoal so you don't need lighter-fluid, and with a cardboard egg carton and some cotton, to make fire lighters for your woodstove, fireplace, or camp fire.
• Our washer has an attachment to reuse water from the last rinse-cycle for the next wash load. The wash water can go into a grey-water system to irrigate your lawn or garden, or flush your toilet. That's three uses for the same water.
• Use the output of your crosscut shredder to pack items for shipment (we stole this idea from The Smoke and Fire Company).
• Use your bad print jobs or old office paper for the toddler to color on or chop it up for taking notes instead of buying note paper.
• Leftover yarn gets woven into patchwork projects. Yarn ends can be put into felting projects for decoration and added strength.
• Dump the water from your canned vegetables into the pot to cook the rice (you learn a lot of tricks when living off a small rain-catchment system during a drought).
• Child-proof medicine bottles store pins and needles safely.
• A broken axe handle is cut down for a new hatchet handle. An old rasp becomes a new froe.
• A good pair of shoes gets resoled instead of replaced.
• Old newspaper or cardboard tubes (toilet paper or paper towels) make biodegradable seedling planters for your spring garden.
• Brown paper from bags absorbs grease from frying, can be used to iron-up spilled wax, and makes great separators for weaving.
• Putting thinned sprouts from the garden on the salad and knowing enough about local weeds to know which ones I just ripped out of the garden are edible (or used for dying wool, or making cordage, or...)
• Use your egg shells to filter coffee (makes it less bitter).
• ...and on and on and on...

Sometimes one of the easiest is just to give things you don't want anymore away instead of throwing them away (the Freecycle Network helps you do this). Once you get into the mindset of reuse, things become automatic. If you need creative inspiration, do field or missionary work and live in a tent for six months. It is not a matter of becoming stingy, but of simply making reuse your first thought, realizing that it is a different way of being lazy— constructively. If I buy this, what can I do with it? When I am throwing something away or starting a new project, what can I reuse? How can I make things easy to reuse so that it doesn't take time away from the things I really want to do? How can I use this as an opportunity to make my life creative and unique, to say something about who I am?

Last Stop, Recycling. When and How?

What we think of as recycling is simply the last stop and industrial level of consumer reuse. Instead of digging more aluminum from the ground, melt down soda cans. Instead of pumping more oil, reclaim tires. The problem with recycling on this level is that, as long as the new material is readily and cheaply available, many recycling programs will have trouble in the marketplace. If it costs a slight amount more per pound to collect, clean, and reprocess aluminum from old cans than to use new aluminum, companies that recycle will have trouble competing with companies which do not. As consumers, we can vote with our wallets to affect that, making it clear we would rather buy recycled products, but the problem is also self-correcting. As less aluminum is available to be mined, the cost of recycled cans will become much more attractive. In the same way, we have oil wells in Texas that have gotten to the point of needing water injection or other techniques to extract new oil. They are too expensive to operate now, but that does not mean we get rid of them; they will be competitive again as oil overseas goes up in price.

Because of this, recycling programs are a way of looking ahead to the point where our trash will be a valuable resource. If we put all of our trash together in a big heap, mining that resource will never be competitive. If we separate it out, cans to one place, paper to another, even materials not as useful today will be available when we need them, instead of being dependent on China like we now are for much lead and copper. Thinking about separability in making products also serves this end. In some cases, the current gain is not economic but health related. Lithium batteries are recycled because lithium in the landfills and therefore potentially in the water supply is a very bad idea.

Even here, creativity can play a critical role in making the process work today. People get stuck on the idea that recycling means turning an old thing back into the same product: old soda cans make new soda cans; old soda bottles make new soda bottles. This is often not the best approach and other options end up using less money with better returns. Yesterday's News™ has made money off of using newspapers for cat-litter. Soda bottles make plastic in car seats. Tires now make an excellent playground mulch. Waste wool makes efficient, fire-resistant batts for home insulation. Restaurant cooking oil is used in biodiesel manufacture. Christmas trees can be used to make animal bedding or mulch. Many municipalities now compost yard waste and sell it back to the town.

The possibilities here are also endless and take constant creative examination as well as market pressure to drive new uses for old things. The more we look toward making recycling easy, the more opportunities we create.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that an end-to-end culture of innovation and reuse needs to replace our culture of consumption and waste— not to the end of impoverishing us, but of giving us more opportunities to spend energy and resources where it makes sense, where it makes the most difference, and where it enables us to be independent, self-sufficient, stable. Dependency on foreign goods, resources, materials is fine for luxuries, extras, frills, but not when your daily life is on the line. Go for convenience once in a while, pamper yourself when you need to, but always leave yourself the option to get by without. In lean times it can make the difference between surviving and being comfortable. In better times, it gives you the satisfaction of long-term security.

A lot of people talk about the environment, about conservation or energy independence. What have you done today?

Copyright © 2008 The Misty Manor, Mercers