Recycling. Make it a Movement!

These days, everyone's recycling, right? You would think so. It is, after all, the era of "green." Undoubtedly people are reporting that they're doing more recycling lately, and rising recovery rates attest to that. But these increases are slow. Access to convenient recycling isn't universal, and even in areas that do have robust recycling options, a lot of valuable materials are still winding up in landfills. It's not because the materials aren't needed, it's because a lot of us are dropping the ball.

Expanding access to recycling, and making it easier for us all to recycle in the first place, are first steps. We need strong and viable aftermarkets for materials and we need industries committed to buying recycled. We need consumers completing the loop. We need infrastructure and we need awareness.  Bottom line: we could all be doing more - individuals, businesses and government.

Recycling shouldn't be thought of as just an act, it should be a movement. Each individual's or institution's contribution to the movement doesn't have to be a sacrifice, either. People tend not to believe the old maxim that small changes can have big impacts. Call me Pollyanna, but I think it's realistic to believe that they do.

Consider this; according to the U.S. EPA's Waste Reduction Model (WARM), a measly 1% increase in the national blended recycling rate would cut 4.15 million metric tons of Greenhouse Gasses. That's the equivalent CO2 reduction of taking more than 760,000 cars off the road. Not just once or twice, but every year. Forever.

It would save more than 29.6 trillion BTU's of energy. That doesn't mean much to most of us, but it's roughly the same amount of energy contained in 5 million barrels of oil. It's enough electricity to take half a million homes off the grid.

Even if you don't think global warming is a big deal (I'm not going to cast any judgments here), you can't argue the economics. Beyond the huge dollars and cents savings from the examples above, the sheer raw materials are worth tens of millions of dollars annually. Right now, we're burying all that money in the ground.

And this is just the impact of a 1% increase. What's our potential? What should be our goal? More importantly, who is leading the movement?

These are big questions, and no single entity is going to answer them. It would be impossible for any government, or industry, or charismatic hero to chart out a game plan and do it all. Every one of us has to be working together. Movements demand individual acts, and we all have to be willing to act responsibly and to be held accountable. We all have to be revolutionaries - in our thinking and in our actions.

So what part are you going to play? What will be your impact?

-Matt McKenna, Keep America Beautiful (http://www.kab.org/site/PageServer?pagename=index)

Image Credit: Veer