Sunday, June 8th, 2008
Reduce and Reuse, Too
Ahhh, “reduce” and “reuse” — the poor stepchildren of “recycle.” Truth is, the grand green triumverate starts with “reduce” and “reuse” for a reason.
Recycling is nice, I suppose, if you’ve absolutely got to use and dispose of something. But the recycling process still uses up a lot of energy — and it’s nearly impossible to say how efficient the process is in any given locale. I recently asked Bry Lynas, OneClimate.net editor and OneWorld’s resident climate/energy scientist/guru, about the value of recycling versus burning paper and cardboard products. He says:
In some places, there may be minimum transport and highly-efficient use made of the waste whilst in others, the paper might be shipped to China for recycling or (maybe this is an ‘urban myth’) tipped into landfills anyway! And that’s what makes your question so difficult to answer. And it’s why I tend to use most of my paper and cardboard either in the stove or in the compost.
Click here to weigh in on that discussion.
And of course every new product you purchase means more energy is needed to produce it and to accumulate the materials that go into it.
If it’s a wood/paper product — like your daily coffee cup — that also means more forest land has been cut down — and CO2 released into the atmosphere.
Other materials could require mining, which often destroys landscapes and pollutes rivers and groundwater. According to EARTHWORKS, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting communities and the environment from the destructive impacts of mineral development:
Mining enough gold for a single ring creates 20 tons of mine waste. To extract the huge volumes of waste rock and ore necessary to produce the gold/silver/copper, most modern mines are enormous open pits. These pits often exceed 1 mile in diameter and 1,000 feet in depth. Some, like the Bingham Canyon mine in Utah, are visible from orbit. The pollution impacts of these operations are proportional to their size: according to the EPA, hardrock mining is the number one toxic polluter in the United States, and has polluted 40% of the stream reaches of the headwaters of western watersheds.
More on mining
And plastics… of course plastic is a petroleum product. So that means even more oil than what’s already needed to produce the energy to create, ship, and sell the product. With oil, of course, come a whole host of negative consequences (from war to displacement of local people to environmental destruction). According to Oil Change International, a non-profit organization working to highlight the true price of oil:
Communities and the environments around them are often subject to seismic explosions and forest clearing during [oil] exploration, the production of toxic drilling muds and waste waters while drilling takes place, and then routine gas flaring during oil extraction. Oil spills from pipelines, tankers and tank farms and deadly dioxins from refineries round out the industries’ deserved polluting reputation….
Since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, successive US administrations have equated national security with access to, and control of, oil – particularly in the Persian Gulf, which holds two-thirds of global oil reserves. In other words, as long as we need oil, we need the Persian Gulf. Faced with this unpleasant fact, every President since Carter has chosen to defend US “access” to the Persian Gulf….
Scholars have examined the relationship between corruption, authoritarian governments, governance, conflict, and extractive industries, and have found strong evidence for a ‘repression effect’, which holds that resource wealth retards democratisation by enabling the government to better fund the apparatus of repression.
More on the true price of oil
And who knows what it takes to turn oil into tupperware (or other plastic products), but it can’t be a simple and painless process. Surely more pollution and energy used there.
So what’s the point here? All these negative consequences can be avoided by simply not buying something new — whenever possible. Hence “reduce.”
If you must buy something new, at least try to get as much use out of it before purchasing another one. Thus, “reuse.”
A few simple suggestions:
For starters, if you drink coffee or another beverage outside the house even on a semi-regular basis, get a reusable cup. I’ve used my coffee mug for orange juice, soda, water, and coffee — I’ve used it in coffee shops and movie theaters alike.
Don’t buy bottled water unless you’re already out and about and have no other choice. And in that case, why not stash that bottle, take it home, and get as much use out of it as possible.
Or try bringing your own tupperware to the bakery — save a bag or a box.
And please, don’t buy tupperware. Put your leftovers in an old pasta-sauce jar. Or if you ever order take out Chinese or other food — save the containers. Reuse. And when you’ve accumulated so many of those little buggers that you just can’t keep them all in your cupboard anymore, look into donating them to Goodwill or another second-hand store, where someone else can buy them cheap to keep them in use.
And then, when all else fails, of course… recycle it.
on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 9:34 pm:
wow. I wonder how Google decided to serve a John McCain ad to this article? The campaign’s ad team must have bought up all kinds of green words.