| |
"Listen up, you couch potatoes:
each recycled beer can saves enough electricity to run a television for three
hours."
~ Denis
Hayes |
"The agriculture we
seek will act like an ecosystem, feature material recycling and run on the contemporary
sunlight of our star."
-- Wes
Jackson | 
|
| |
To achieve true sustainability,
we must reduce our 'garbage index" - that which we permanently throw away into
the environment that will not be naturally recycled for reuse - to near zero.
Productive activities must be organized as closed systems. Minerals and other
nonbiodegradable resources, once taken from the ground, must become a part of
society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials
may be disposed into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways that assure that
they are absorbed back into the natural production system.
-- David
Korten |
Recycling
is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional
recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed
for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and
resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling
in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be
designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we
use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather
than degraded, quality.
-- William McDonough and Michael Braungart
The
case for recycling is strong. The bottom line is clear. Recycling requires a trivial
amount of our time. Recycling saves money and reduces pollution. Recycling creates
more jobs than landfilling or incineration. And a largely ignored but very important
consideration, recycling reduces our need to dump our garbage in someone else's
backyard.
-- David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance
"Recycling
is an industry comparable in size to auto and truck manufacturing"
--National
Recycling Coalition.
Use
it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.
-- New England proverb
Recycling
Quotes
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