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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
|
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 |
|
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
 |
"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
|
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
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
|
|
"Listen
up, you couch potatoes: each recycled beer can
saves enough electricity to run a television
for three hours."
~ Denis
Hayes
|
"The
agriculture we seek will act like an ecosystem,
feature material recycling and run on the contemporary
sunlight of our star."
-- Wes
Jackson |
|
|
|
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
|
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
|
|
"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 |
|
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
