The Current Status Of Recycling

"In this episode, which comes out right before Earth Day, we're going to do a sort of  'state of the recycling world' address. Every so often there's big news about recycling, so it makes sense to check in every once in a while to see what's the current state of things. The famous "chasing arrows" logo — three arrows chasing each other around in a triangle — promises a closed cycle: no waste, no inputs. Obviously, that's an idealization but efficiency should always be the goal; beyond the obvious environmental concerns, efficiency puts money in all of our pockets. How are we doing?

"Basically we want to find out if recycling a given material is a net win or a net loss, and deciding what's a win and what's not is really the first question. You could look at it from a purely financial perspective, or you could look at it from a purely environmental perspective, or some combination of the two. Recycling requires a lot of energy, including all the logistics of transportation, the materials preparation, and all the energy that goes into the actual industrial process of recycling. You have to consider the entire cycle. That includes a ton of variables, and those variables are different in every location and in every industry and material type. Compare recycling bottles in Texas to recycling the same bottles in Alaska. One might make a lot of sense, the other might not at all."

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Is Recycling for Real?