Reduce, Reuse and (only then) Recycle

We’ve all heard the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra for decades — and for many of us since childhood. It’s a catchy slogan that has certainly been effective in many ways, and all three of those “R” actions are helpful to our environment. But the three Rs are not equal; in fact, the most well-known of these — recycling — is the least useful by a pretty wide margin.

This is admittedly not new information in the sustainability world, but in general, most people still think of recycling first when it comes to useful environmental efforts. I’d wager that for most of you reading this, your companies and neighborhoods have clear recycling instructions but little-to-no guidance on reusing or reducing. This is because recycling is easy to do, often requiring little effort, thought, or creativity — just throw your aluminum can in the recycling bin instead of the trash.

Credit where it’s due, governments have made the act of recycling fairly simple.

Yet when you dig into it, recycling is not as simple as it seems. For one, it’s layered with a large number of lesser-known rules — think of the various numbers corresponding to different types of plastics, or how food contamination can render items non-recyclable — that leads to people are habitually recycling incorrectly without knowing it. 

Furthermore, recycling falls by the wayside when the economics don’t make sense. This has been especially true for the U.S. since the Chinese market dried up after China banned “the import of most plastics and other materials that were not up to new, more stringent purity standards” in 2018. The problem extends far beyond traditional recycling physical items, though, with e-waste becoming a growing problem — it is highly expensive to recycle electronics, and there is little economic incentive to recycle some materials such as rare metals. Ultimately, as one plastics expert bluntly put it last month, “Most of the things we put in blue bins that are not recycled are put in the garbage because they are things waste companies can’t make money off, and that is the true bottleneck.”

It also turns out that, even within the term “recycling,” there are important distinctions that provide greatly different outcomes — I highly recommend this article from Metabolic, which does a great job of examining different methods of recycling, and comparing them to other forms of conservation. Most recycling ends up being “downcycling,” meaning the new product is often lower quality than the previous one. This is still generally preferable to landfill, but given that recycling takes additional energy to break down the initial product and build the new product, turning high-quality items into low-quality ones is not an ideal outcome.

This is where “reuse” separates itself from “recycle.” If you look at the first chart in that Metabolic article, you will see that reuse preserves the maximum amount of value that went into creating the item in the first place. As the article states, “Reusing components would preserve the embodied value in the entire components, not just the materials. Repairing an entire product would preserve the time, effort, and transportation that went into assembling the components.” With these benefits, we can then hit that final “R,” and reduce the amount of materials and energy — and money — needed to create products.

Image from Metabolic

While recycling can still play a role in a sustainable world, it’s clear we need to start shifting the conversation toward reuse as the preferred action. Some of you may have seen that my company, Rheaply, recently put together a Reuse Initiative. (And not coincidentally, we utilized a few memes poking fun at recycling.) Seeing people discover and utilize the power of reuse first-hand has been a major inspiration to me over the past few months, and has solidified my belief that reuse can come before recycling not just in the three Rs, but in people’s actions as well.

If you are interested in learning more, I invite you to a personal Clubhouse event on June 14 at 2:00 pm, where we can start thinking of ways reuse can garner the same or more attention than recycling, and shift our attention to ways all 3 Rs can co-exist to create a viable, cost-effective zero-waste-to-landfill strategy.