My Dad was one of the smartest people I know. It took me a long time to figure that out.
I recycle stuff for a living. And my Dad always said, “That’s the wrong word. What you’re doing is reclamation. Reclaiming raw materials.”
He was right on the money. The raw materials that come from recycling are the most important raw materials on earth.
We’ve all seen the pictures of Earth taken from the Apollo moon trips: a small blue globe floating in an infinite black space. Except for the energy coming in from the sun, all of the raw materials we’ll ever have are on that little globe. Except for the energy coming in from the sun, we have to live with what we’ve got.
Every time we throw away a tin or aluminum can, that’s steel or aluminum we can’t replace. There’s just so much of that stuff on earth, and what’s left is getting harder and harder and more and more expensive and environmentally more and more damaging to find.
Every time we throw away a newspaper or magazine, that means we have to go into the forest and cut trees to make the next one. Trees are at least renewable (thanks to that energy from the sun), but cutting trees for paper destroys species and ecosystems and local cultures, and those are things, once they’re gone, that we can’t bring back.
Every time we throw out a plastic bottle or bag, we’re throwing out oil, because plastic is nothing more than highly refined petroleum. It’s bad enough that we waste gas on things like driving an SUV to the supermarket, but to refine gas into a plastic bottle, use it once for five minutes, then toss it away – that’s really stupid.
There’s another picture that you see in environmental literature. It shows three Earths floating in the black void of space. Three Earths is what is would take to provide enough resources, enough copper and tin and iron and aluminum and gas and trees – for everyone in the world to live like we Americans do. Right now. Not in some far off future when we’ve taken more and more out of the earth. Right now. Three Earths. But we only have one.
The message is simple. If we have any hope of maintaining our standard of living, if we have any hope of raising standards of living for the billions of people who have so little compared to ourselves, we cannot continue to take nonrenewable resources, use them once, then throw them into landfills. We have to, we really have to, keep them circulating in the economy.
That’s the relevance of recycling. Because it’s not just recycling, it’s not just keeping stuff out of landfills. It’s raw materials. The most important raw materials on Earth.