The final potential option for waste is recovery through recycling. According to the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, the recycling rate in Vermont is about 35%, even though over 60% of Vermont’s municipal solid waste is recyclable/compostable. Recycling is much better than the above options: it saves energy, resources, and landfill space. However, recycling is not the cure-all solution. Production and excessive consumption pose far greater environmental, social, and health risks than the residential waste, itself. Platt & Seldman (2000) stated, “For every ton of municipal discards wasted, about 71 tons of manufacturing, mining, oil and gas exploration, agricultural, coal combustion, and other discards are produced.” Thus, the vast majority of waste produced throughout an item’s lifecycle is generated before the object even reaches the consumer’s hands.
Tossing said item in the recycling bin, as opposed to the garbage, does allow the product to be made into something new; thus reducing the emissions and waste that would have been generated if that new product had been made out of virgin materials. However, using and recycling single-use items day after day does not do anything to address the energy, emissions, and waste associated with the production of these single-use items in the first place. Additionally, the recycling process also requires energy, and can generate pollution and waste byproducts of its own.
Not all recycling is truly closed-loop, either; Annie Leonard, in The Story of Stuff, wrote,
“[Recycling] often isn’t even recycling but is actually something called downcycling. True recycling achieves a circular closed loop production process (a bottle into a bottle into a bottle), while downcycling just makes Stuff into a lower-grade material and a secondary product (a plastic jug into carpet backing). At best, downcycling reduces the need for virgin ingredients for the secondary item, but it never reduces the resources needed to make a replacement for the original item.”
There is still merit to reducing extraction of virgin materials, and some recycling really is closed-loop (such as aluminum), so recycling is inarguably better than landfilling. However, recycling (as it occurs today) is far from perfect; there are far more environmentally and socially responsible ways to reduce waste.