Recycling...

Recycling is one of the greatest social movements of the twenty first century... Everyone does it, thinks about doing it, or feels bad for not doing it. But is it a scam, a fir fie, a misnomer?

Firstly, recycling is actually the third action in the series of three...reduce, reuse, recycle! Yet we seem to forget about the importance of this trilogy.
1: If we reduce, there is less waste to be concerned with - a very important and fundamental issue for our heavily consumeristic society - a major initiative in itself.
2: If from what we have still purchased, after reducing, we reuse then there is less waste to be concerned with...
3: the final activity is, of course, recycling. And, yes, we seem to be quite ok with that. As long as there are programs or organizations happy to help us dispose of our waste in a feel good way.

However...
1: we don't reduce - I see gross amounts of packaging on the simplest of products. Even to purchase vegetables some people put them in plastic bags and then load them into plastic bags to get them home... and then store them in plastic bags and cook them in plastic containers and ... this is not good. Plastic is not the inert compound we think it is (more on this soon). And that is just the packaging... what about simple reducing the amount of goods purchased?

2: we don't reuse much - I see some efforts in elementary schools where some items are "handy" for art etc... but big time reusing... well again if the packaging is plastic - it is difficult to find an appropriate use for it (especially around food).

3: recycling - making money, energy costs to recycling the product, environmental impacts of recycling products... transport costs to recycling plants, storage of recycled product... all of these elements have an impact...

I am not saying that we shouldn't recycle, just that we need to practice all three actions - in the correct order and keep conscious as to the full implications of each step taken.