Recycling is good for the environment and for human health. Recycling, in fact, is a way for disposal of hazardous and solid wastes.

Hi Antonis,

Recycling is only one part of the processes involved in determining environmental performance in an area.

At a certain moment in my career, a colleague and myself had to develop criteria for optimal environmental performance of company investments in new porcesses for the production of certain consumer products.

We defined the following criteria for a certain chain of processes, to produce a certain end-product, whatever it may be,

First, a minimal use of raw materials per unit of end product.

Second, optimal energy efficiency in the production of the end product.

Third, a minimal pollution per unit end product, whether it be air pollution, water pollution, or soil and groundwater pollution.

Fourth, the life cycle from cradle to grave of the product must be optimized based on:

- first re-use. Which is genuine cradle to cradle!

- secondly, recycling. Which is cradle to degraded cradle!

- and thirdly recuperation as energy. Which is cradle to hell!

- Dumping should be as minimal as possible per unit of end product.

Which is genuine cradle to grave!

So recycling as you can see is only a small element in the total balance of environmental performance indicators for a certain product and the processes needed to make the end-product.

CHeers,

Frank

@Frank...

Superbly summarized....

Hi Frank. Interesting approach. However, I have a different approach. Even though recycling provide us several benefits, it is still in third position in waste hierocracy, behind reduce and reuse. On one hand, we are living in a consuming society and most of the products have limited life (like mobiles, pc's, electronic equipment, and much more) and on the other, we try to convince citizens to do prevention. As it is too difficult to change the citizen’s behaviour the easiest one is to convince them to do recycling which is not really fair. We cannot take part or do recycling on the one hand and on the other to continue increasing our daily waste. (latest statistics indicated that waste generation per capital in the world Vs the Human development index range from 100/0.4 to 700/0.9 from country to country, while at the same time the daily waste generation per capital varies regarding European Countries from 0.750-1.8 Kg). How easy is to do prevention if at the same time several companies spend millions on advertising to promote their products (this remains an unsolved research question)? Then recycling seems to be the best available practice. China regarding the “Green Fence Operation”, sent back to Europe during 2013, 337 containers (somewhere of 800000 t, with total cost up to 0.2 Billion €) because MRFs (A materials recovery facility, materials reclamation facility, materials recycling facility or Multi re-use facility - MRF - pronounced "murf"- is a specialized plant that receives, separates and prepares recyclable materials for marketing to end-user manufacturers) were > 1%. And if in one area, citizens participated in a complete recycling program without do prevention then recycling cannot be a tool to measure environmental performance. I have done several Strategic plans in Governmental and Local Authorities regarding environmental performances and the most difficult is to change citizen behaviour to do prevention and correct recycling.

I agree Antonis,

Changing the behaviour of citizens is a difficult task. Nonetheless, the city where I live (Antwerp, Belgium) has reached a recycling level of around 80% of all refuse offered to nature (so to say). The main driver of the change in habit with respect to recycling which took place about 15 years ago, is money (taxation of refuse bags) . The less waste you offer to the city the less you pay for your bags. If you don't offer a waste fraction in the right bag, (PMD, organic waste, paper, glass and remaining refuse) you get fined with €40. If you are caught dumping refuse in nature or wherever, hence not before your doorstep, you get fined by €400. And there is social control in Antwerp. Some people don't like it when others fuck the waste recycling system.

Re-use is slowly coming into view now. Some shops buy re-usable stuff, or sell it for the owner, with a small fee on it. These shops, I can assure you are doing more and more business, since folks in my city are not getting richer, on the contrary. So if you can buy somthing you need in these shops, you reduce the cost maybe five or tenfold. For cars this system is in existence for a long time, but now the offical garages are almost excluded from that circuit because the price they offer for a second hand car is too low compared to the unofficial market. Second and third hand cars are sold on the internet now. And also this re-use of cars runs like a train (so to say).

Hence, depending on the product, re-use is diffcult or quite easy. The lower the income per capita for a city, the higher re-use, and to some extent recycling as well.

In India a special caste lives from the recycling of gold coming from a specific city quarter (in Delhi) where a lot of gold jewelry is produced by another caste and some gold dust disappears in the sewer. The sewers are emptied by the poorer (lower) caste, which extracts the gold from the sewer shit by hand and with a little bit of mercury. These people get about 1 to 2 grams of gold a day this way. They live (survive) from that. But not very long because of the mercury.

I don't consider that as a very good example to stimulate recycling, but it exists and some Indian people survive with it and can hope for a better karma in the next generation.

Cheers,

Frank

Dear Antonis, Recycling is one of 3 approaches in promoting environmental sustainability. These are 3Rs consisting of reduce, reuse and recycle.

Yes Choen, I personally agree. How ever there is one more "R" behind the 3Rs; The forth is "RE-THINK". “Rethink” is needed to achieve the other 3Rs. “Rethink” means that we have to redefined, reconsider our relation with the products.

Hi,

Yes, recycling expresses the environmental performance of an area. But reduce and reuse are more effective waste management tools in each levels (household, institutional,etc). Whether we can reduce the waste generation (e.g. in production process) or reuse the things for multiple purposes , the availability for recycling reduces. Most of international standards certifications (ISO 14001:2004, ISO 14004:2004) measures the environmental performances using whole 3R concept (do not restricted to recycling). Hence use of whole 3R concept to measure the environmental performance in one area is most important (do not restricted to trends).

Dear Antonis,

The recycling is really an important parameter in estimating the performance of organic waste matters treatment. Organic waste matters is easy to get sick and smelly, so they are harmful to surrounding. Furthermore, the amount of organic waste matter increased year by year, which is really a big problem for urban. Lots of methods could be used for organic matter treatment, such as anaerobic fermentation, compost, thermolysis et al. During the treatment processes, the organic matters are converted into small molecule substance, which could be recycled to produce energy. The energy substance production yield and organic matter removal efficiency are the most two important aspects to estimate the treatment processes.

Hi Xinyuan,

A solution to reduce organic waste, collection and treatment is to reduce or completely process it at home. I realize that this is rather difficult in large high towered cities, but in in the city I live, most of the residential housing are one family houses, much less appartment blocks. Most of these houses have small gardens or at least a small backyard in which one can put a composting unit. These units are sold very cheap (€15) by the city recycling services. I have one such unit of about 1.5 m3. It composts all organic waste from my family (4 individuals) on a yearly basis. There is no organic waste leaving my house. All is composted. This saves a lot of money, public as well as private. The compost is used in a garden your own, or someone elses in need of compost. Small social city gardens are also the spots where the compost is used for small scale city farming purposes.

Hence, depending on the structure of a city, organic waste can be completely eliminated by family level composting, or by composting on a larger scale by waste services.

I am using the compost system now for some 10 years, and not a single year did I have to dispose of excess organic waste.

Life can be simple when well organized.

Cheers,

Frank

HI Frank：

it is really good to collect and dispose the organic matters near home, and this method skips the transportation of the solid waste and liberate the workforce. However, it is not suitable for the urban area of my country, where most people live in and limited land is available. People are crowded in the city area and the land of city is as valuable as gold. it is impossible to keep a small piece of land for organic waste compost here. The organic waste produced in the city must be treated integratedly, which is organized by government.

while, the government in my country are inspiring the compost of organic waste at home in rural area, as your country does. the compost process could produce biogas and supplement the energy use, but the production of biogas varies with seasons. it is also insecure to some degree, so the high-quality facilities must be used.

Very interesting discussion. Recycling itself can have a good or bad impact on the environment depending on the method employed. composting of organic matter can be a productive application while paper recycling and similar operations might do more bad than good. Even in our urban surroundings we used to sort our daily refuse matter and the organic stuff were used as fertilizer and the rest of the stuff we burnt in a small area and the resulting ash also used as fertilizer for plants. garbage collecting area and the burnt matter combination always made very rich soil with lots of earth worms. Later on with so called busy lives and township programs in the name of development and this desire for more comforts changed all. A garbage truck used to come near the door step and gave differently colored gunny bags to sort and dispose the garbage and once a week it was collected. Now the simple and nature- friendly lifestyles were changed because the people have become more lethargic. This collected garbage is used as landfill material of marshy areas which sometimes ruin the natural habitats of most flora and fauna. At the end these this filled land is used to construct housing schemes, etc. During rainy seasons and other times these areas are smelly and still we have not witnessed the impact of these processes to human beings.What I believe is 3Rs are great but as Antonio highlighted Re- think is the best way. If we think of the cause of the garbage production and what will be its end result perhaps we can achieve a much sustainable third R.

As Stumm and Davis have pointed out some 40 years ago (see link), recyling is an effective tool to protect the environment up to a certain point. Once this point is surpassed (e.g. more than xy % of a material is recycled), the loading of the environment is increasing again due to the increasing amount of energy and materials that is needed for additional recycling, and recycling becomes counterproductive. Hence, a recycling  indicator that is used to measure environmental performance must be based on the detailed knowledge of this curve. Are there any recycling indicators on the market that take such curves into account?

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-322-82545-2_4