What I mean is, when a lot of people plan to recycle, they look at stopping products from ending up in landfill. This is a completely pointless thing to worry about. Some materials do require special handling to dispose of safely (batteries, fragile plastics, etc.), but if your goal is a general âhow do I repurpose this so it doesnât end up in landfill?â, that solves absolutely nothing.
We arenât lacking in landfill space. The shirt in the back of your closet that you never ever wear is exactly as bad for the environment in the back of your closet as it is in landfill; storing it is just delaying the point in time at which itâll start to break down. If I buy something in a plastic bottle, and then repurpose that plastic bottle into a garden pot or something⌠that garden pot is still gonna go to landfill eventually. I havenât saved anything. The plastic was landfill as soon as it was manufactured. That shirt was landfill (unless you choose to burn it, which isnât environmentally any better) the moment the fabric was produced.
The critical point when it comes to making a difference with recycling isnât before stuff hits landfill; itâs before the stuff is produced in the first place. âReduce, reuse, recycleâ only works because âreuseâ and ârecycleâ are strategies to feed into âreduceâ. Recycling glass bottles or aluminium cans is useful only because it reduces the amount of new glass and aluminium being produced (note: most of the plastic bottles you recycle go straight to landfill in other countries). Recycling fabric is useful only if it prevents the purchase of new fabric, and thus on a large scale, the production of new fabric.
For example, letâs say my pants are threadbare beyond repair, and I cut them up for dusters. Important question: do I use dusters? Do I need this many dusters? Is this, in short, an act that is stopping me from buying dusters made from newly manufactured material? If itâs not, then itâs not doing anything at all to help the environment. That same amount of fabric is still going to landfill. (Thatâs not a reason not to do it, it just doesnât help the environment at all.)
Another example: I tend to cut up old clothes and pick up fabric thatâs going to be thrown out a lot, to make bags and wall hangings and rugs and things. I recycle a LOT of fabric. Is this helping the environment? For some people doing this, it probably is, because theyâre making stuff theyâd otherwise buy. But for me, itâs doing nothing whatsoever for the environment. If I wasnât making cushions and wall hangings, I wouldnât be buying any. I just wouldnât own any cushions or wall hangings. Theyâre fun to make, they brighten the place up, but they donât affect my consumption (and therefore the incentive for cushions and wall hanging to be produced) at all; Iâm buying zero of those things either way. Is this recycling? Yes. Does it have any effect whatsoever on helping the environment? No. Itâs just delaying the amount of time before that exact same fabric ends becomes rubbish.
Same is true of the aformentioned plastic bottles into garden pots. That plastic is going into landfill whether you recycle it first or not. The question is, did repurposing it stop you from having to buy plastic garden pots? Will the cumulative effect of people doing this lower the amount of plastic garden pots being produced? Will that lower the amount of plastic being produced?
Stopping things from reaching landfill is largely an irrelevant and pointless practice. Recycling is only environmentally useful when it affects the future production of materials. Repurposing materials is often fun and practical regardless (I love repurposing materials), but itâs not automatically environmentally useful just because youâre reusing something.
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