How do current recycling programs factor into creating less stuff that ends up in landfills?
Recycling is a really important part of the puzzle and it’s important because it’s so much better to recycle discarded goods than to burn them or bury them. It saves tremendous amounts of energy, creates much less pollution, it saves natural resources—all of those things are really important. That said, it’s crucial for people who are thinking about these issues to understand the limitations of recycling. Its built-in limitations are called “down cycling”: When materials are reprocessed over and over again, they begin to break down on the molecular level, so paper fibers become shorter and can’t hold together, glass and plastic molecules become weaker and aren’t strong enough to hold together. The other limitation is that the market is a real obstacle. Recycled materials are supposed to compete on the open market with virgin raw materials that have received massive subsidies over the years from the U.S. government. It’s really impossible to calculate the real costs of a plastic water b
