Why Reducing Pwns Recycling
Submitted by PlasticLess.com Blog
When your community appears to have a fully functional recycling program, it is easy to become complacent about reducing and reusing our waste materials. I try to stay away from the subject of plastic recycling on this blog. That is not because I think that recycling is a bad idea. I think that recycling gets more than enough attention and I have heard a lot of stories about the stockpiling of material that has entered the ‘recycling’ stream. The economic disaster has hit the recyclables markets hard. There is no reducables market and if there was, I think that it would be booming right now.
I would like to see people stop referring to the act of placing materials in a container of a certain color and carrying it to the curb as ‘recycling.’ Please quote me on that, even if you want to call me names 
“Plastics recycling is a tough business,” says Jerry Lynch, who manages a project at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute designed to eliminate the sorting step and reclaim the plastics. “Plastics are contaminated and not easy to wash. They come in different colors and materials, even within one classification. And collection is difficult, meaning that plastics take up a lot of room, and [they] are light and unbreakable, so transportation is expensive. Finally, virgin plastic is inexpensive.”
