Recycling Process
The New Math, Part 5
A tremendous amount of the energy that we consume and greenhouse gasses that we emit worldwide comes from making “stuff.”
April 25, 2014
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A tremendous amount of the energy that we consume and greenhouse gasses that we emit worldwide comes from making “stuff.”
There is a new math of greenhouse gas accounting by which some people are viewing and evaluating everything. How do you use this math to show the impact of your recycling and sustainable materials management (SMM) efforts? And perhaps more importantly, how do you share that information with people not fully immersed in the climate change lexicon?
I would argue that any climate action plan that omits stuff – the stuff we buy, the stuff we use, the stuff we throw away – is at best incomplete.
Recycling, composting and reusing materials reduces or eliminates greenhouse gas emissions at various points in the manufacturing process.
Most metrics like WARM that address the lifecycle impacts of “stuff” do not include all of the ancillary impacts related to it.
As I have said in several presentations, if the only thing you care about is keeping stuff out of the landfill, littering works as well as recycling or any other sustainable resource management activity. At some point, we need to look beyond keeping stuff out of the landfill and really look at the impact of what we are doing. What are the financial impacts of your alternatives? What are the environmental impacts or the social impacts?
Why do you recycle? At some point, we have to talk about impact. Because not all recycling is created equal. How you recycle stuff matters. In some cases it matters as much if not more than whether you recycle at all.
A bulletin board completely covered with posters. A cacophony of words and images passing by when you are already overloaded on words and images from hours of time reading textbooks, staring at a laptop or sitting in class. So how do you make your posters and promotional posters stand out? How do you make sure they are more than just white noise?
Hopefully before reading this you have sorted out the who, what, when, where, why and how of your recycling education. Now, the best way to explain this is with some hunting references and analogies. For those of you who are opposed to hunting for food, before you start dusting off your old Ted Nugent hate mail to resend to me, and lest this content gets lost in any controversy about hunting, let’s assume I am talking about nature photography. The analogies work either way.
With a modicum of understanding about recycling markets, you will be able to significantly improve the economics of your recycling program.
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