The Sustainability R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and More

This week I heard an educator for sustainability from the United Arab Emirates talk via skype at the CELF summer institute about the 6R’s of sustainability, rather than the more familiar 3R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle).  Respect and refuse were two of the additional R's she listed, but I could not recall the 6^th R.  I immediately googled 6R’s and found that rather than a standardized list of 6Rs, there are a whole slew of sustainability R’s offered on different web pages.  That got me thinking, how many sustainability R’s should we have?  Which are the most important? 

Here are some of the contenders I found (starting with the big 3):

1.     Reduce

2.     Reuse

3.     Recycle

4.     Respect

5.     Refuse

6.     Replenish

7.     Rethink

8.     Repair

9.     Reinvent

10.  Recover

11.  Responsibility

12.  Replant

13.  Restore

14.  Rot

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

The classic 3R’s of sustainability were on all of the lists I found. 

Reduce

By reducing the amount of “stuff” we obtain, we decrease the energy needed for manufacture, transport and disposal.   We also cause less disruption to the ecosystems where the materials originate, are transported through and are disposed.  Life on a finite world, with finite resources, always involves limits.

Reuse

The more we can reuse items and avoid single use items, the better.  Take a look at my earlier post on the humble handkerchief vs. the throw-away tissue.  

Recycle

There has been a huge shift across the country from throwing most waste into the trash, to recycling a large portion of it.  Single-stream recycling is changing the amount of recycling done by many households.  Check out yesterday's post on recycling.  

The new Sustainability R’s:

Here are some of the additional sustainability R's I found in my search.

Respect and Responsibility both ask us to think about the ecosystem, including the people who live around the world, and think about any effects our actions might have.

Refuse

To me, refuse fits within the category reduce.  By refusing items, we are essentially reducing our consumption.  This month of July, many in the sustainability community are encouraging others to refuse single-use disposable plastic items.  At ReduceFootprints blog this week’s #CTWW challenge is to refuse plastic bags.

Replenish, replant, restore, recover all seem to convey a similar theme: trying to leave the world as we found it for those who come after us. 

Rethink/reinvent promote divergent/out-of-the-box thinking.  As is often attributed to Einstein, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."  This is a critical part of sustainability and one that I think should definitely be highlighted.  By rethinking, we also make sure to view actions from different perspectives and consider how they will effect different constituencies of our planet. 

Repair/renew might be lumped together with the replenish  group in terms of repairing the environment for future generations.  However, they can also be thought of as repairing or renewing an item so that it may be reused. 

Rot – I found this on a list of R's  to represent composting, mulching and other parts of the cycle.  Growing up, my family collected kitchen scraps for our garden well before composting became remotely fashionable.  

Here are some more R's I’ve thought of:

Reflect, Realize, Relate, Rotate, Remember, Return, Remediate

I like Return, because it conveys a sense of a full circle, rather than a linear path.  I think ultimately we should be thinking “cradle to cradle” for all items we use, in other words, consider the entire cycle so that there is no “waste” product at any point.  This will be the subject for a future post.

What would your sustainability R’s be?

Are there any R's that are not mentioned that you would include?

(This post was shared on Healthy, Happy, Green & Natural Party Hop.)

Recycling: A dramatic change!

Large recycling bin used for single-stream recycling

When I was a girl, there was no recycling in my NYC neighborhood.  Everything disposed of was thrown into the trash and ultimately went to the landfill.  I used to imagine an invention where I could insert a used piece of paper in the top, and out the bottom would come a clean, recycled piece of paper.

In the last year, I’ve noticed an explosion of recycling efforts around the country.  Suddenly, single-stream recycling is everywhere, and many people can now recycle the majority of their waste. 

In my town, we can now recycle an incredible array of items.  Take a look at everything that can be recycled.   

Wanting to find out the limits of our new recycling, I sent queries: 

1.  Could I recycle the plastic bags with zippers that sheets are sold in? YES

2.  What about plastic burritos wrappers? YES

3.  granola bar wrappers? YES

4.  Al foil backed paper that enclose some individual tea bags? YES

5.  What about if there's burned on food from grilling on Al foil? STILL OK TO PUT IN

Here is a great article that describes how the recycling facility sorts and prepares for selling the single-stream recycling that is collected.  It's actually cheaper for trash haulers to bring single-stream recycling to the recycling facility than it is for them to dump it as trash.  When in doubt about whether an item is recyclable or not, it is best to recycle it.

If you have single-stream recycling in your neighborhood, make sure you are taking full advantage and are recycling everything that is allowable.

In the past few months, many households in my neighborhood have gone from having a huge trash container and a small recycling bin, to having a huge recycling container and just a small amount of trash for the landfill. 

In NYC public schools and many other schools around the country, students can now recycle metal & foil; glass bottles & jars; rigid plastics; milk & juice cartons and drink boxes and paper in their school cafeterias.   The NYC neighborhood where I grew up now recycles paper, cardboard, metal, glass, plastic (rigid plastics) & cartons (for food and beverages).

It’s been amazing to witness this monumental shift from large scale dumping to large-scale recycling.

It’s important to remember, however, that items that are recycled still incur energy and pollution costs to the environment from manufacturing and transport.   Of the classic 3R's, reducing and reusing are preferred to recycling.

(This post was shared on Healthy, Happy, Green & Natural Party Hop.)