Reflection - Recycling

What this series clearly demonstrates is the extensive and exhausive process involved in the recycling of materials.

While recycling is one solution to combat the consumption of natural resources, I don't believe it is the best. Even though modern recycling methods have allowed recycling to be a much more viable option, the amount of energy expended in the process is still quite large, and this causes further problems with global warming. While we're solving one problem, we're contributing to another.

While the recycling process is considerably less involving compared to the harvesting or manufacture of virgin materials, it is still a very large scale industrial process, one of which the benefits can be argued. In a recent factory tour, it was revealed to us that the manufacturer only ever dealt with virgin plastics, as a quality control issue. Quality control may be the case, but the waste material was then shipped to a customer in China, which reuses the material for their own products. Is this the best solution? I don't believe so considering the required transportation of material as well, they could possibly be using just as much embodied energy to use this 'recycled' virgin material as they would purchasing virgin material in the first place, only at a fraction of the cost. What does this mean? Most manufacturers don't even want to touch recycled plastics, regardless of how well it is processed.

There are some recycling processes that I do see benefits towards however, such as the recycling of paper, tetrapak and glass since there are so many highly consumable products which can be manufactured from these products. And that is where I think recycling has its benefits, in products which are highly consumable and have a short life, not products which require vast amounts of energy to produce such as those which are manufactured from aluminium, plastics and tinplate. What I have taken from this is that material selection should not just be how recyclable or available a material is, but I must also consider the process in which the material has been manufactured, in order to reduce its environmental impact as much as possible.

If it would be possible to design products which use these materials which I believe are 'clean' recyclable materials, then I will endevour to do so.


Image: Recycling Logo
http://www.howtosella.biz/image.axd?picture=2011%2F1%2Frecycling%2520logo.jpg