Is there a downside to Recycling?
We all think that recycling is 100% good for the environment, but it does have some negative impacts as well as positive ones.
The first and foremost negative impact of recycling is the mindset that it gives people. It makes people think that it is okay to waste more because the packaging is going to be recycled anyway. "Recycling’s main impact is to convince us that it’s okay to be wasteful in other areas, because we make up for it through recycling. It encourages consumption, rather than pointing out ways to reduce consumption overall." (Handley A. 2013) Fortunately this problem can be easily solved by teaching people to reduce and reuse before recycling instead of just recycle everything straight away.
Another problem is the inefficiency of all-in-one recycling. This is where all recyclables are collected in the same bin and sorted later, instead of being sorted at your home. This means that there is greater pollution being generated at the sorting factories and millions of dollars worth of equipment being used.
The demand for recycled products is inceasing as environmental awareness grows and our recycling technologies can not keep up with this increasing demand. "Demand for most recyclable products is growing way too fast to keep up with anything that recycling can—at the moment—provide. Aluminum is especially difficult, since demand for it grows a little less than ten percent every year." (Handley A. 2013) Even when we recycle our aluminium cans the quality of the aluminium is not good enough to be made into much, except a new can, and even then we are still short. "The average American drinks 2.5 cans of soda per day. That’s about 778 million cans. If 100,000 cans are recycled every minute (they are), we’re still about 600 million cans short. And that’s just in one day" (Handley A. 2013) Recycling technologies need to keep up with the demand if recycling is going to become more sustainable in the future.
Current recycling methods are not very efficient. Sometimes it is easier and cheaper to dump old products in landfill and create new ones from scratch. "Take plastic shopping bags, for example. It’s estimated that fewer than one percent are recycled, and that might be just because it’s so expensive. It costs $4,000 US to recycle one ton of plastic bags, but a ton of recycled bags only sells for $32! As a result, about 300,000 tons of them end up in a landfill every year." (Handley A. 2013) We need our recycling technologies to improve before we have too much landfill.
Although recycling is currently not 100% environmentally friendly it is still better than not recycling at all.