| We
can help educate our families and communities about the importance of recycling
for our environment, and how each of us can make a difference for a better world
by recycling.
-- Robert Alan Silverstein |  |
 |
But our waste problem is
not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful
from top to bottom—a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive,
and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom—and all of us are involved in
it.
-- Wendell
Berry |
Much
of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and
unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
-- Wendell Berry
There appears
to be a deeply embedded uneasiness in our culture about throwing away junk that
can be reused. Perhaps, in part, it is guilt about consumption. Perhaps it also
feels unnatural. Mother Nature doesn't throw stuff away. Dead trees, birds, beetles
and elephants are pretty quickly recycled by the system.
--William Booth
... if the society
toward which we are developing is not to be a nightmare of exhaustion, we must
use the interlude of the present era to develop a new technology which is based
on a circular flow of materials such that the only sources of man's provisions
will be his own waste products. -
-- Kenneth
E. Boulding | 
|
As long as man was
small in numbers and limited in technology, he could realistically regard the
earth as an infinite reservoir, an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool
for outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth has become a space
ship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social,
biological, and physical system in which man is enmeshed. In what we might call
the "old days," when man was small in numbers and earth was large, he could pollute
it with impunity, though even then he frequently destroyed his immediate environment
and had to move on to a new spot, which he then proceeded to destroy. Now man
can no longer do this; he must live in the whole system, in which he must recycle
his wastes and really face up to the problem of the increase in material entropy
which his activities create. In a space ship there are no sewers.
-- Kenneth
E. Boulding
 | *
"Solid wastes" are the discarded leftovers of our advanced consumer society. This
growing mountain of garbage and trash represents not only an attitude of indifference
toward valuable natural resources, but also a serious economic and public health
problem.
-- Jimmy Carter
|
We
are not to throw away those things which can benefit our neighbor. Goods are called
good because they can be used for good: they are instruments for good, in the
hands of those who use them properly.
-- Clement of Alexandria (150?-220?)
"75% of colleges
and universities have a recycling program."
--Colorado State University Recycling
Program
"Recycling
is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to
emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling
good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem."
--Barry
Commoner
 |
Years ago,
we all talked about recycling and not dumping things down your drain and all of
that, but talking doesn't help much. Basically, it's going to have to be legislation
because the impact is so huge and diversified.
-- Ted
Danson |
The greatest economic
benefit of recycling is that it provides a base of materials for robust, efficient
manufacturing industries. So far this decade, U.S. paper manufacturers have voluntarily
built more than 45 recycling-based pulp and paper mills and only a handful that
use virgin wood. This is not just because recycling plants are better for the
environment, but because they are a less expensive way to increase production,
taking advantage of the increasing supplies of used paper collected in business
and community recycling programs.
-- Richard A. Denison & John F. Ruston
The ever-mounting
glut of waste materials is characteristic by-product of modern "consumer society."
It might even be argued that capitalism's continual need to find of generate markets
means that disposibility and waste have become the spine of the system. To consume
means, literally, "to destroy or expend," and in the garbage crisis we confront
the underlying truth of a society in which enormous productive capacities and
market forces have harnessed human needs and desires, without regard to the long
or even short-term future of life on the planet.
-- Stuart Ewen
| *
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to
disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.
~ R.
Buckminster Fuller |  |
Recycling
Quotes
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