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We
can help educate our families and communities about
the importance of recycling for our environment, and
how each of us can make a difference for a better
world by recycling.
-- Robert
Alan Silverstein
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But
our waste problem is not the fault only of producers.
It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from
top to bottom—a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at
the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness
at the bottom—and all of us are involved in it.
-- Wendell
Berry
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Much
of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional
flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets
that we have become addicted to. -- Wendell
Berry
There
appears to be a deeply embedded uneasiness in our culture
about throwing away junk that can be reused. Perhaps, in
part, it is guilt about consumption. Perhaps it also feels
unnatural. Mother Nature doesn't throw stuff away. Dead
trees, birds, beetles and elephants are pretty quickly recycled
by the system.
--William Booth
...
if the society toward which we are developing is not
to be a nightmare of exhaustion, we must use the interlude
of the present era to develop a new technology which
is based on a circular flow of materials such that the
only sources of man's provisions will be his own waste
products. -
-- Kenneth
E. Boulding |
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As long
as man was small in numbers and limited in technology, he
could realistically regard the earth as an infinite reservoir,
an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool for
outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth
has become a space ship, not only in our imagination but
also in the hard realities of the social, biological, and
physical system in which man is enmeshed. In what we might
call the "old days," when man was small in numbers and earth
was large, he could pollute it with impunity, though even
then he frequently destroyed his immediate environment and
had to move on to a new spot, which he then proceeded to
destroy. Now man can no longer do this; he must live in
the whole system, in which he must recycle his wastes and
really face up to the problem of the increase in material
entropy which his activities create. In a space ship there
are no sewers.
-- Kenneth
E. Boulding
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*
"Solid wastes" are the discarded leftovers of our
advanced consumer society. This growing mountain of
garbage and trash represents not only an attitude
of indifference toward valuable natural resources,
but also a serious economic and public health problem.
-- Jimmy
Carter
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We are
not to throw away those things which can benefit our neighbor.
Goods are called good because they can be used for good:
they are instruments for good, in the hands of those who
use them properly.
-- Clement of Alexandria (150?-220?)
"75%
of colleges and universities have a recycling program."
--Colorado State University Recycling Program
"Recycling
is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it.
The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between
recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling
for the purpose of solving the trash problem."
--Barry Commoner
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Years
ago, we all talked about recycling and not dumping
things down your drain and all of that, but talking
doesn't help much. Basically, it's going to have to
be legislation because the impact is so huge and diversified.
-- Ted
Danson
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The
greatest economic benefit of recycling is that it provides
a base of materials for robust, efficient manufacturing
industries. So far this decade, U.S. paper manufacturers
have voluntarily built more than 45 recycling-based pulp
and paper mills and only a handful that use virgin wood.
This is not just because recycling plants are better for
the environment, but because they are a less expensive way
to increase production, taking advantage of the increasing
supplies of used paper collected in business and community
recycling programs.
-- Richard A. Denison & John F. Ruston
The
ever-mounting glut of waste materials is characteristic
by-product of modern "consumer society." It might even be
argued that capitalism's continual need to find of generate
markets means that disposibility and waste have become the
spine of the system. To consume means, literally, "to destroy
or expend," and in the garbage crisis we confront the underlying
truth of a society in which enormous productive capacities
and market forces have harnessed human needs and desires,
without regard to the long or even short-term future of
life on the planet.
-- Stuart Ewen
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*
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not
harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've
been ignorant of their value.
~ R.
Buckminster Fuller
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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
Source
reduction is, on the face it, perhaps the most appealing
of all the possible approaches to solid-waste management.
-- William Rathje and Cullen Murphy
*
"What we are living with is the result of human choices
and it can be changed by making better, wiser choices."
-- Robert
Redford
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"Recycling
one aluminum can saves enough energy to run your TV for
three hours."
--Reynolds Metal Company
We are
recycling not only to protect the environment, but for economic
reasons as well. Disposal is simply too costly and too dangerous.
The challenge is to redirect the flow of raw materials going
to landfill into strengthening our declining local economies.
The solution to pollution is self-reliant cities and counties.
-- Neil Seldman, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 1990
It's
time we stopped turning up our noses at the nation's garbage
dumps and started appreciating them for what they really
are -- the municipal mines, forests, oil wells and energy
sources of the future!
-- Max Spendlove
I
only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people
throwing away things we could use.
-- Mother
Teresa |
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Wisdom
understands that in a world of ecological interconnectedness
there is no such things as “away.” We don’t throw things
“away,” we simply put them someplace where they defile the
land, foul the water, pollute the air or change the earth’s
atmosphere.
-- Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat
"Widely
spaced earth-sheltered towns offer sweeping views over the
plains. High-speed trains link the communities. Food is
grown in the region. Bikeways are everywhere. Nonpolluting
hydrogen powers all vehicles. Sunlight and wind generate
the hydrogen. Note the earth-covered bridges, the continuous
window bands, the wind machines across the farmlands. In
this new America, everything is reused, recycled, conserved."
-- Malcolm Wells
"You
can tell how high a society is by how much of its garbage
is recycled."
-- Dhyani Ywahoo
