LinkedIn Top Green Voice | The Circular Economist | Helping Companies Make Less 🗑️ More 💵 | Keynote speaker
"Isn't circular economy just recycling?" Here's why that's a dangerous idea: I get this question at every keynote I do. People talk about recycling waste, sorting waste, burning waste, and whatnot. But we are missing something really important: 1. Not everything is designed to be recycled 2. Not everything is collected for recycling 3. There's no market for many recyclables 5. There are huge losses during recycling 6. Recycling is cost and energy-intense Of all the resources we use, only 8% is recycled! The rest is added to stock, landfilled, burned, or emitted. We can't recycle our way out of this. The best waste is no waste. Let's talk a lot more about that! Agree? #circulareconomy #recycling #wastemanagement
I worked at a company that provided Quality Assurance solutions for the printing industry (which is basically every package you buy and so much more). You can’t even imagine the amount of waste produced by this industry, just for you not to see a smear of color anywhere on the package, and I’ve seen so much… Recycling is but a small grain of sand compared to the amount of waste produced everyday by the industry. I’ll give you an example, I visited a site in India, it was printing cigarette filters, there was a streak of color in the print that went on for 3km of material (1m wide). Can you guess what they did with the material?
You know Vojtech Vosecky, totally agree with you. This is exactly what our foundation Clean Up The World tries to implifies. Although, recycling is good too, better recycling the waste than just burning, however, our target must be the creation of zero waste and making this as a standard. Right?
Agree, recycling is part of the solution, but not all of it! Ultimately we need to reduce production and reduce waste generation. I just did a podcast where I talked about exactly that. Different solutions that should be explored before recycling, are reducing plastic usage, redesigning for recyclability (e.g., switching to mono material), reusing and repurposing. 👇 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jessiefrahm_recycling-is-not-your-most-important-problem-activity-7214243766776270848-vNol?utm_source=combined_share_message&utm_medium=member_ios
Love this. What's one simple way I could start producing less waste in my day-to-day life Vojtech, that I might not have thought of?
Recycling should always be the last step. Unfortunately for many it's the first and only step Vojtech.
Remember that less than 1% is recycled whenever you accept a plastic bag.
Circular economy goes way beyond recycling. It's about rethinking how we make, use, and reuse everything. Recycling is just one small piece of the circular economy puzzle. We need to focus on designing out waste from the start.
Totally agree. Recycling should probably be the last on the list after refusing, reducing, re-using etc. Some seem to think that recycling means you don't have to take responsibility for the rest.
LinkedIn Top Green Voice | The Circular Economist | Helping Companies Make Less 🗑️ More 💵 | Keynote speaker
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