Rethink, Reduce, Redesign, Repair, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle, Recover, Remove

Repeat

Like most of my neighbours, I sort my waste into paper-and-cardboard / glass / random plastics / random metals.  I put everything out at once, in bundles or boxes for the first category and in plastic bags for all the rest.  Oh, and a bin for the non-recyclables.  It all gets picked up at right about the same time, involving three different trucks: one for refuse, one for paper and cardboard, and one for the rest.

I do this weekly.  The items are clean, flattened, and/or washed.  I’m not required to do that much, or even to recycle domestic waste at all (with a few exceptions discussed later), and the fact that I participate gives me a warm glow.  I’m helping the environment.  I deserve to feel a tiny bit smug.

Oh, really?

Why not gather paper and cardboard into separate bundles?  Bag glass by colour?  Sort plastics into recycle categories?  (I’ve had to do that at other places I’ve lived in the past.)  It’s because I don’t have the room.  Or the time.  (Or the interest, if I’m honest.)  Even more importantly, the people who pick it up don’t have that many sorting partitions on their trucks.  Things get merged back together to be sorted (along with everyone else’s stuff) later.  So why should I bother to go further?  To get more benefit, I’d pretty much have to deliver my stuff to the recycle centre myself.  I’d have to buy a car (of course it would be used).

Thus, I feel I’m performing what’s expected of me (my civic duty, if you will) and that’s important.  The city pays for the recyclables pickup, whereas I pay directly for waste pickup (whose charges to the customer rise exponentially with the rise in tip fees).  Moreover, the city can offset their pickup costs by selling the sorted recyclables.  And they’re extending the life of our local landfill in the process.  So it’s all a win-win, right?

Maybe.  Maybe not.

My city has “free” kerbside pickup, so that increases participation.  However, people in the suburbs get recycle bins as well, but not those of us in the central business district.  Instead, we must stack our stuff on the footpath.  That means when the wind blows hard (a regular occurrence in Wellington), I can’t put the plastics out because the wind can start the bags rolling down the street.  If a passing car hits one and bursts open the bag, then flattened bottles and jugs blow every which way, littering the neighbourhood.  If my neighbours aren’t also careful, then I may end up with my yard full of litter anyway.  And the washing, folding, and sorting of all that stuff takes up an hour or so of my time every week.  Washing the glass and plastic requires hot water and soap.  And there are now three trucks stopping at each building on my street instead of only one.

Is my recycling a net benefit overall?  How can I tell?  The actual dollar figures involved aren’t discussed much.
 

What Choices for Domestic Recycling Need to Be Made?

• What can be recycled?

• How is recycling in your area being handled?

The types of bins which would suit a detached 5-bedroom house in the country would be unsuitable for a 20-storey block of flats in the inner city.  Councils must take all kinds of things into account when they plan the frequency of waste and recycling collections.  The size and type of the container plays a key part.
 

• What processing must be done by the household?

In fact, the switch towards single-stream collection is being driven by new technologies that can identify and sort the various materials with little or no human intervention.  Single-stream collection makes it more convenient for householders to recycle and means more materials are diverted from the waste stream.  Paper and plastic items are spread out on a conveyor belt in a single layer.  When illuminated by a halogen lamp, each type of material reflects a unique combination of wavelengths in the infra-red spectrum that can be identified, much like a fingerprint.  By analysing data from a sensor that detects light in both the visible and the near-infra-red spectrum, a computer is able to determine the colour, type, shape and position of each item.  Air jets are then activated to push particular items from one conveyor belt to another, or into a bin.  Numerous types of paper, plastic or combinations thereof can thus be sorted with up to 98% accuracy.  (Does it save money overall?  I was unable to determine that.)

Japanese municipal data reveal that municipalities implement recycling programmes that fit the demographic profiles of their residents.  Municipalities with a considerable number of single-recycler households tend to implement simple waste separation programmes.  The labour market positions of spouses have different impacts on recycling policies.  Municipalities implementing comprehensive recycling programmes collect plastic bottles and containers more frequently than do other municipalities.

• What are the potential problems?

Random Re-cycling-Related Trivia

Price of 10 pencils made from “recycled twigs,” from the Nature Company:  $39.50
Tons of trash generated last January by NFL-sponsored Super Bowl events:  313
Percentage of this later reused or recycled:  41
Number of the 10 largest environmental magazines that are printed on recycled paper:  3
Number of the 10 billion plastic Coke bottles distributed in the US each year that are made from recycled material:  0
(The aluminium Coke cans ARE made from recycled goods, however — so buy your Cokes in cans if it matters a lot.)
 
 

Where Does Our Refuse End Up?

Barge?  Processing plant?  Incinerator?  Landfill after all?  Slow boat to China?  Pacific Garbage Patch?

Where does it all go?  Probably Asia, particularly China, the largest importer of recycling from the rich world.  Electric cords, for example, may turn up in Guangdong province where factories salvage the copper wire and melt the stripped plastic into new slippers.  China’s thriving economy is desperate for stuff that consumers in America and elsewhere thoughtlessly throw away.  This multibillion-dollar recycling trade stands as a globalisation success albeit an unsung one that turns over as much as $500 billion annually and employs a huge number of people.  Building booms in China, have caused an explosion of demand for steel, copper and other resources in short supply there, so it imports metals, often as scrap.  Americans, meanwhile, have more scrap than they can handle because they have less demand for manufacturing materials (labour costs are too high and environment laws too strict for cost-effective scrap salvaging).  Here, recycling is good for business.

People now worry more about the afterlife of their mobile phones than they do their cars.  Why?  Because of the invention of the motor shredder, which turns old vehicles into scrap metal.  In 1970 America had at least 20 million abandoned rusting cars scattered across the landscape.  By 2012, more than half were gone.  As the world’s biggest car buyer today, China has become the fastest growing market for motor shredders.

It’s often cheaper for American scrap-yards to send their stuff to China than to process it locally.  Shipping companies hauling goods to the US would rather not return to China empty so they offer discounts on what they call backhauls.

The recycling industry manages to squeeze value from used goods, but unfortunately nothing is 100% recyclable.  The special chemistry of many products, such as iPhone touchscreens, means they can’t be recycled.  Consumers should be more aware of which products turn into nasty wastes and keep nudging companies to design easy-to-repair recyclable products.  Discarding waste in China is reportedly less regulated.

Over time, recycling rates in the US have increased from just over 6% of municipal solid waste (MSW) generated in 1960 to 10% in 1980, 16% in 1990, 29% in 2000, to 34% in 2010.  Disposal of waste in landfills has decreased from 94% of the amount generated in 1960 to under 54% of that generated in 2011.  The US state of Maine recycles 48% of waste while the state of Louisiana recycles only about 1%.  Paper products are the most recycled items while food waste, wood, and plastics are the least recycled.  For example, the generation of plastic trash bags amounted to a million tons in 2011, but there was no significant recovery for recycling.  More than 3 times as much waste as plastic bags is generated by disposable diapers, both for infants and adult incontinence products, but there’s no significant recycling or composting identified for them, either.
 

Pressures: Social, Environmental, and Economic

When a city introduces a kerbside recycling programme, the sight of all those recycling trucks driving around can raise doubts about whether the collection and transportation of waste materials requires more energy than it saves.  A Danish review of 55 life-cycle analyses (selected for rigorous methodology) compared the impact of recycling with that of burying or burning particular types of waste material.  In 83% of all scenarios that included recycling, it was indeed better for the environment.  (Cheaper?  Since it didn’t say, I’m guessing no.)  Perhaps the most valuable benefit of recycling is saving energy and/or reducing greenhouse gases and pollution by substituting scrap for virgin feedstock.  Extracting metals from ore is, in particular, extremely energy-intensive.  Recycling aluminium can reduce the energy required by as much as 95%, so there’s a ready market for cans.  Savings for other materials are lower but substantial: 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper, and 30% for glass.  Recycling reduces smog, acid rain, and waterway contamination.  But net savings?  If it’s high, participation will be correspondingly high.

But according to the second law of thermodynamics, each time energy is used, some of its usefulness is lost.  Deterioration, wear and tear, pollution, or co-mingling are facts of life.  Recycling can never achieve zero waste — it will always have limits.

Rather than recycling materials for purely economic reasons (mainly to reduce waste flow to landfills and incinerators and to enhance image in tourist and convention industries), municipalities also wish to encourage community participation in a noble act.  According to the OECD, the average person creates 3.3 pound (1.5 kilograms) of rubbish a day in France, 2.7 pounds in Canada, and under 2.3 pounds in Japan.  Yet the average American tosses away from 4.5 to 7 pounds a day (only 25% being recycled).  As a result, communities in America spend more on their waste management than on fire protection, parks and recreation, libraries, or schoolbooks.

Most kerbside recycling programmes are not financially self-sustaining.  The cost of collecting, transporting and sorting materials generally exceeds the revenues generated by selling the recyclables; it also exceeds disposal costs.  Exceptions exist near ports in dense urban areas that charge high fees for landfill disposal and enjoy good market conditions for the sale of recyclables.  San Francisco, which changed from multi to single-stream collection a few years ago, now boasts a recycling rate of 69%—one of the highest in America.  With the exception of garden and food waste, all the city’s kerbside recyclables are sorted in a 200,000-square-foot facility that combines machines with manpower.  The plant processes an average of 750 tons of paper, plastic, glass and metals a day.
 

How Does Recycling Work?

The process begins when a truck arrives and dumps its load of recyclables at one end of the building. The materials are then piled onto large conveyer belts that transport them to a manual sorting station. There, workers sift through everything, taking out plastic bags, large pieces of cardboard and other items that could damage or obstruct the sorting machines. Plastic bags are especially troublesome as they tend to catch in the screens that send weightier materials, such as bottles and cans, in one direction and the paper in another. (I don’t know what happens to all those bags.) Corrugated cardboard is separated from mixed paper, both of which are then baled and sold. Plastic bottles and cartons are plucked out by hand. The most common types, PET (type 1) and HDPE (type 2), are collected separately; the rest go into a mixed-plastics bin.

Next, a magnet pulls out any ferrous metals, typically tin-plated or steel cans, while the non-ferrous metals, mostly aluminium cans, are ejected by eddy current. Eddy-current separators, in use since the early 1990s, consist of a rapidly revolving magnetic rotor inside a long, cylindrical drum that rotates at a slower speed. As the aluminium cans are carried over this drum by a conveyer belt, the magnetic field from the rotor induces circulating electric currents, called eddy currents, within them. This creates a secondary magnetic field around the cans that’s repelled by the magnetic field of the rotor, literally ejecting the aluminium cans from the other waste materials.

Finally, the glass is separated by hand into clear, brown, amber and green. For each load, the entire sorting process from start to finish takes about an hour. Unfortunately, the conveyor belts move too fast to catch everything and the workers and machines both make mistakes they can’t correct.

For many materials the process of turning them back into useful raw materials is straightforward: metals are shredded, paper is pulped, and glass is crushed into cullet. Metals and glass can be re-melted numerous times, while paper can only be recycled up to 6 times — as it goes through the process, its fibres get shorter and its quality deteriorates.

Plastics (from fossil fuels) are somewhat different.  They have many useful properties — flexibility, light weight, can be shaped into any form — and there are many different types, most of which need to be processed separately.  For PET (type 1 plastics), food-grade bottle-to-bottle recycling exists.  PET flakes have to undergo a so-called “super-clean recycling technology” which consumes more energy.  But each recycling step means a loss of properties.  Thus recycling is limited.  In practice, plastics waste streams are not well-defined and actually contain a mixture of 10 or even more different polymers, various types of fillers, reinforcing materials, colorants, plasticizers, stabilizers, coatings and flame retardants.  Therefore, items are often “down-cycled” into other products such as plastic lumber (used in place of wood), drain pipes, and carpet fibres.  All of this tends to ultimately end up in landfills or incinerators.  Even so, plastics are used more and more, not just for packaging, but also in cars, televisions and personal computers.  Such products are made of a variety of materials and can contain multiple types of plastic, metals (some toxic), and glass, they’re especially difficult to dismantle and recycle.
 

Why Do It If It Doesn’t Pay Off?

Why recycle?

• Civic awareness / civic pride.  (In fact, more people recycle than vote.)
• To have the infrastructure already in place when participation becomes economically desirous.
• To decrease the consumption of primary resources and to slow the rate of pollution and depletion.  (In other words, to help the environment and to leave something for kids — a much longer-term investment.)
• It reduces guilt over the quantity of trash being produced.

Metal is the only material consistently profitable to salvage.  For aluminium, the case is overwhelming because it requires only a tiny fraction of the energy consumed when mining bauxite and refining it into the same amount of metal.  There are people who collect aluminium cans not because they like to recycle but because the cans bring money.  It’s claimed that metals are sustainable products, which can be efficiently and infinitely recycled.  But in actual practice, losses and contamination are inevitable.  A certain fraction is lost to corrosion.  It’s also impossible to collect all the material that was put on the market.  Of 60 metals being tracked, 18 exhibit a recycle rate exceeding 50% (the ones worth money), 34 (including all rare-earth metals) exhibiting a rate less than 1% (not cost effective).

For other products, benefits are more finely balanced.  Glass is heavy, so transporting it uses a lot of fossil fuel.  Collecting it and grinding it into aggregate to make roads can consume more energy and produce more pollution than just taking it to a landfill.  But recycling it to make more bottles generally reaps a saving — if it’s sorted by colour.  In general, the narrower the categories into which recyclables are sorted and the more meticulous the separation, the easier they are to process and the higher the price they’ll fetch.  White office paper is worth more than mixed paper, for example, and bottles made from a single kind of plastic are worth more than an assortment.  That’s where economics start getting tricky.  Manual sorting is expensive in the rich world (why recyclables are often shipped to places with low labour costs).  The Anglo-Saxon world dislikes sorting its own waste and often makes a hash of it.

Both marginal and average costs of recycling systems exceed those of waste collection and disposal systems.  So the reason to recycle isn’t because it saves money.  In Atlantic County, New Jersey, selling recyclable goods brings in $2.45 million.  However, the cost of collecting and sorting these recycled materials plus interest payments on the recycling facility costs the county over $3 million.  With the time, money, and energy spent collecting and processing recycled goods, the price of recycling is much higher than discarding waste into landfills or incinerators.  Despite the high costs, proponents of recycling argue that the environmental and health benefits outweigh the costs.  Recycling advocates believe that recycling is more than just an issue of economics and is essential to caring for human health and environmental sustainability.  Professor Daniel K Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Montana, argues that US municipal kerbside recycling programmes waste resources and probably do little, if anything, to benefit the environment.  Kerbside recycling expends an “undue amount capital and labour per pound of material” to reuse items of extremely low value.  “The only things that intentionally end up in municipal solid waste,” writes Benjamin, “are both low in value and costly to reuse or recycle.  Yet these are the items that municipal recycling programmes are targeting.”
 

And What Are the Alternatives (Again)?

The volume of waste going to landfills causes several problems.  Some municipalities are running out of space.  The former Fresh Kills landfill in New York, at 12 square kilometres (five square miles), is the world’s biggest man-made structure, dwarfing Egypt’s pyramids.  But even where plenty of land is available, densely packed organic matter produces methane as it rots, which can catch fire or explode.  The process of decay produces ammonia too, which in quantity can poison fish and amphibians and render water undrinkable.  Bacteria that break down rotting waste produce acids, which the high proportion of fireplace ash formerly found in household rubbish helped neutralise — but with little or no ash today the acids can concentrate enough to dissolve poisonous metals such as lead and cadmium, carrying them into groundwater and thus into drinking water and the food chain.  Landfills have paints and lead batteries, thermometers and mercury-laden light bulbs, electronic goods full of hazards, pesticides, cleaning solvents, and used motor oil (to name a few).  In theory, these things shouldn’t be in the landfill, but not everyone follows the rules.  However, statistician Bjørn Lomborg calculated that a 10-mile-square, 255-foot-deep landfill could contain all the trash produced in the US over the next century.  Fairly cheaply, too.

Is burning waste better?  Smoke from the incineration may carry many of the same toxic substances that are being burned off into the atmosphere.  Smoke containing nitrogen and sulphur contributes to acid rain.  Soot causes respiratory problems.  Burning organic wastes produces dangerous dioxins and furans.  But newer Incinerators [calling themselves waste-to-energy plants WTE) plants] have solved these common pollution problems.  One of the world’s biggest such plants in Fairfax County, Virginia, takes in a million tonnes of municipal waste a year.  The waste moves slowly through a furnace at ever-increasing temperatures to ensure a thorough burn.  This generates up to 80 megawatts of power annually, enough to power 75,000 homes.  To eliminate dioxins, regulations require waste to reach a temperature of at least 1,800°F.  In the smokestack, filters remove oxides of sulphur and nitrogen, acidic gases, heavy metals and soot.  All water used in the process is treated on site.  Ash goes to an adjacent landfill, where it takes up only 1/10th or less of the original waste’s volume.  America’s Environmental Protection Agency calculates that emissions of dioxins and furans from America’s incinerators have reduced from 8,900 grams a year to 80.  (By comparison, burning household and garden waste in barrels and bonfires in suburban and rural areas produces 500 grams a year.)

Yet local authorities in many countries are hostile to new incinerators.  The main objection to WTE incineration is not that it’s bad, but that better WTE technologies are waiting in the wings.  Some form of heat-treatment, such as high-pressure superheated steam in an autoclave, or gasification using a plasma arc that vaporises garbage in the absence of oxygen would mean that few noxious combustion products are produced.  The result would be a biofuel that could be used to generate electricity.  Though still experimental, such technologies will one day prove more attractive than today’s WTE incineration.  (But how long does one wait for the future to arrive?)

On the other hand, no regulations are foolproof.  Environmental groups argue that landfill gas systems capture a lower proportion of methane emissions than waste firms claim, and that the liners that keep leachate in landfills are bound to spring leaks sooner or later.  Regulators who say that burning rubbish is now safe said the same thing when incinerators were still spewing out dioxins.  And anything that’s burned when it still has recycle value represents an energy loss.
 

The mountain of rubbish at the Puente Hills Landfill in Los Angeles, the largest of the 1,900 municipal landfills in America, is over 500-feet high — taller than most of the skyscrapers in the city’s downtown area to the west — and covers 700 acres (2.8 square kilometres).  With 60 years’ worth of decomposing rubbish, Puente Hills produces enough captured methane to generate electricity for 70,000 homes.

Most of the developing world’s waste is put into open dumps with no controls on leachate or landfill gas.

Open burning of waste, another common disposal method, releases lots of dioxins, just as incinerators did in the rich world before rules were tightened.  Some of the worst offenders include India, Kenya, Peru, and Russia.  A big worry is the export of hazardous waste from rich countries, where it’s expensive to get rid of, to poor ones, where it can be dumped cheaply.  But this is a common pattern.  In principle, it’s illegal unless the receiving government gives explicit prior consent.  But exporters sometimes succeed in passing off waste chemicals as useful ones, or clapped-out computers as donations to the poor.  If ill-paid customs officials spot the deception, they can sometimes be bribed.  Nothing new here.

The United Nations estimates the world discards up to 50 million tonnes of electronic goods (e-waste) annually.  Most ends up in poor countries where scavengers break apart old mobile phones, computers and televisions to extract valuable metals for recycling, in the process releasing various harmful substances.  E-waste dumps heavily contaminated with lead, dioxins and phthalates can be found in Ghana, India, and China.

Almost all the world’s big ships are dismantled and recycled in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.  Shipbreaking provides jobs for tens of thousands of people, as well as cheap raw materials for industry.  But slicing up huge oil tankers or freighters on beaches releases oil, heavy metals, dioxins, asbestos and other toxic chemicals into the sea, the ultimate receptacle for a lot of of the world’s waste — an estimated 6.4 million tonnes a year.
 

What Might Help?

• Avoidance (Prevention):

• Minimisation:

• Reuse:

• Repurpose:

• Repair:  (Preventive maintenance, too.)

• Share:

• Transform:

• Proper disposition:

Conclusion

Increased household recycling is a policy goal in many countries but that’s often because household recycling is, to a large extent, based on voluntary efforts.  It is necessary to understand the mechanisms behind household voluntary contributions to recycling and how they are affected by various policy measures.  The most important motivations for household recycling are the belief that recycling is good for the environment and that recycling is a civic duty.  Local and regional governments may wish to encourage these feelings.  Increasing the supply of recycling services has a significant effect on household recycling, and door-to-door collection and drop-off centres are the two most effective methods in this respect.  Recycling rates can be boosted by charging households and businesses more if they produce more rubbish, and by reducing the frequency of rubbish collections while increasing that of recycling collections.  But domestic recycling doesn’t really save money.

Recycling needs people to donate their time and attention to make it viable.  Some people participate because they need the warm glow that doing their civic duty (belonging to a community) can bring.  If you get a warm glow from recycling, by all means recycle.  If you feel that the time you’re donating now to collect, prepare, and present your household recyclables will help ensure a cleaner world in the future for your children, then why not recycle?

Otherwise, spend an hour a week picking up litter.  That would have more short-term benefit.  But it may be harder to persist.
 

Sources

 
“2014 Energy and Economic Value of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), Including Non-Recycled Plastics (NRP), Currently Landfilled in the Fifty States” by Nickolas J Themelis and Charlie Mussche, Columbia Engineering Center, 9 July 2014, http://www.americanchemistry.com/Policy/Energy/Energy-Recovery/2014-Update-of-Potential-for-Energy-Recovery-from-Municipal-Solid-Waste-and-Non-Recycled-Plastics.pdf.

“Cost-Benefit Analysis of Recycling in the United States: Is Recycling Worth It?” by Daniel Ettehadieh, University of Maryland: Considering Another Side Essays, Spring 2011, http://www.english.umd.edu/interpolations/2601.

“The costs of municipal waste and recycling programs” by Robert A Bohma, David H Folzb, Thomas C Kinnamanc, Michael J Podolsky, ¬Resources, Conservation and Recycling_ Volume 54, Issue 11, September 2010, Pages 864–871, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344910000236.

“Councils waste £200MILLION of taxpayers’ money on different types of bins because they can’t agree on standard shapes and sizes” by Ben Spencer, The Daily Mail, 16 July 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2692604/Councils-waste-200MILLION-taxpayers-money-different-types-bins-t-agree-standard-shapes-sizes.html.

“Discarded LCD Screens Find New Use in Medicine” by Shane McGlaun, 14 July 2009, Daily Tech, http://www.dailytech.com/Discarded+LCD+Screens+Find+New+Use+in+Medicine/article15679.htm.

 
“Effects of norms and policy incentives on household recycling: An international comparison” by Bente Halvorsen, Resources, Conservation and Recycling, October 2011, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344912001061.

“Food Waste in the United Kingdom” from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste_in_the_United_Kingdom.

“Garbology” from The Economist, 27 April 2012, http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/04/garbology-0?zid=313&ah=fe2aac0b11adef572d67aed9273b6e55.

“Managing Waste Properly Is Expensive, which Is Why Rich Countries Mostly Do It Better than Poor Ones” from The Economist 26 February 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/13135413?zid=313&ah=fe2aac0b11adef572d67aed9273b6e55.

“Moving from recycling to waste prevention: a review of barriers and enablers” by Andreas Bartl, Waste Management Resources, September 2014 vol. 32 no. 9 suppl 3-18, http://wmr.sagepub.com/content/32/9_suppl/3.full.pdf+html.
 

“Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2012” by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/solidwaste/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/2012_msw_fs.pdf.

“Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2011 Facts and Figures” by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/MSWcharacterization_fnl_060713_2_rpt.pdf.

“Puente Hills Landfill” from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puente_Hills_Landfill.

“Recycling” by Jilette Penn and Raymond Teller, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, Season 2 Episode 5, aired 29 April 2004, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExEVZlQia4.

“Recycling” by Jane S Shaw, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, 2008, http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Recycling.html.

 
“Recycling” from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling.

“Recycling Is a Waste” from Big Think, 15 August 2010, http://bigthink.com/dangerous-ideas/14-recycling-is-a-waste.

“Repair Cafés: First Makers, Now Menders” from The Economist, 9 June 2014, http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/06/repair-caf-s.

“Round and Round It Goes” from The Economist, 26 February 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/13135337.

“The Truth about Recycling” from The Economist, 7 June 2007, http://www.economist.com/node/9249262.

 
“Waste separation at home: Are Japanese municipal curbside recycling policies efficient?” by Shigeru Matsumoto, Resources, Conservation and Recycling Volume 55, Issue 3, January 2011, Pages 325–334, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344910002211.

“What Really Happens to Human Junk” from The Economist, 11 January 2014, http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21593398-what-really-happens-human-junk-plastic-arts.
 

The Distillery

If you’re reading this, you desperately need a hobby.

— Epitaph on the tombstone of Allan Dale Willcox