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"Listen up, you couch potatoes: each recycled
beer can saves enough electricity to run a television
for three hours."
~ Denis Hayes
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"The agriculture we seek will act like an ecosystem,
feature material recycling and run on the contemporary
sunlight of our star."
-- Wes Jackson |
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To achieve true sustainability, we must reduce
our 'garbage index" - that which we permanently
throw away into the environment that will not
be naturally recycled for reuse - to near zero.
Productive activities must be organized as closed
systems. Minerals and other nonbiodegradable resources,
once taken from the ground, must become a part
of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled
in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed
into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways
that assure that they are absorbed back into the
natural production system.
-- David Korten
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Recycling
is more expensive for communities than it needs to be,
partly because traditional recycling tries to force
materials into more lifetimes than they are designed
for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that
itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects
of modern consumption were designed with recycling in
mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials,
products must be designed from the very beginning to
be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe
the return to industrial systems of materials with improved,
rather than degraded, quality.
-- William McDonough and Michael Braungart
The
case for recycling is strong. The bottom line is clear.
Recycling requires a trivial amount of our time. Recycling
saves money and reduces pollution. Recycling creates
more jobs than landfilling or incineration. And a largely
ignored but very important consideration, recycling
reduces our need to dump our garbage in someone else's
backyard.
-- David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance
"Recycling
is an industry comparable in size to auto and truck
manufacturing"
--National Recycling Coalition.
Use
it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.
-- New England proverb
