Recycling Quotes

“[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.”
― Erma Bombeck

“All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.”
― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

“Plastic should be a high value material... [It] should be in products that last a long time, and at the end of the life, you recycle it. To take oil or natural gas that took millions of years to produce and then to make a disposable product that last minutes or seconds, and then to just discard it--I think that's not a good way of using this resource. (Robert Haley)”
― Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story – An Engaging Analysis of Cultural Dependency and the Resulting Environmental Crisis

“If you'd like to gain a new understanding of upcycling and recycling, get into gardening.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them in the sack. The fowls were fluffing in the dust and sun: that crook-neck white pullet Mumma said she would hit on the head if only she had the courage to; but she hadn't.”
― Patrick White, The Vivisector

“Everything we need to know about upcycling, we can learn from fungi.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“It's unwise to waste resources, and it's also unwise to waste capacity. Every system should maximize utilization.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“They say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.”
― Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

“Cleaning up is expensive; arson is cheap.”
― Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future

“Zero waste is itself, a waste.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Pollution is big business in the hands of man.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Why are we so liberal towards the industry for creating products whose responsibility of environmentally-friendly disposal belongs to nobody? The cost of recycling needs to be inbuilt in the product itself - it is a change long overdue.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“With superior sentience, come superior screw-ups. And this holds particularly true for industrialization. Even if we put aside carbon emission, in the year 2020 alone humankind has produced over 2 billion tonnes of trash, which is expected to rise over 70% by the year 2050.

Thus, in the name of progress we the gadget-mad gargoyles keep acting as the true eco-terrorists of the glorious dumping ground, called the planet earth. 2% of all our waste is e-waste. And the alarming bit here is that, that 2% e-waste comprises over 70% of our overall toxic waste.

So, what can you do, you ask? Simple - reject less, repair more. Try to make things last as long as possible, or pass them on to those who have need for them. Don't let things go to waste, just because you can afford new ones.

For example, my kid cousin's laptop has been acting up for some time now. But instead of buying them a new pc, I ordered the replacement for the faulty part and repaired the laptop myself. This way, we not only reduce our e-waste footprint on the planet, but in the process, we teach kids to value things.

The point is, whether you do it yourself or get it done by a professional, by practicing repair, you are actively participating in the making of a greener, cleaner and healthier world.

It's not enough to be just a consumer, you gotta be a conscious consumer, otherwise there is no difference between a consumer and a slave. That is why, right-to-repair is not only a human rights issue, it is also an environmental issue. Repairing and recycling are the bedrock of sustainability. So I say again - reject less, repair more.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“Reject less, repair more.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“People talk about climate change but do they recycle? Do they compost? Do they only buy locally grown food? How many cell phones and electronic gadgets do they go through in a year? How much waste does each individual personally contribute to landfills?”
― June Stoyer

“Like any ecosystem, a modern economy cannot survive without recycling. Just as animals and plants are continually recycling the oxygen and carbon dioxide that the other provides, so too must workers recycle their wages by spending them in shops and businesses recycle their revenues by spending them on salaries if both are to survive. And just as in our ecosystems, in which a failure of recycling leads to desertification, so when recycling breaks down in the economy we end up with a crisis that results in devastating poverty and deprivation.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

“When it's absolutely necessary, recycling is a better option than sending an item to the landfill. It does save energy, conserve natural resources, divert materials from landfills, and create a demand for recovered materials. Although it is a form of disposal, it provides a guide for making better purchases, based on the knowledge of what recycles best. When buying new, we should choose products that not only support reuse but also are made of materials that have a high postconsumer content, are compatible with our community's recycling program, and are likely to get recycled over and over (e.g., steel, aluminum, glass, or paper) versus downcycled (e.g., plastics).”
― Bea Johnson, Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste

“We consumers can greatly allay the concerns associated with recycling by applying the 5 Rs in order. By the time we have refused what we do not need, reduced what we do need, and reused what we consume, little needs to be recycled -also simplifying the guesswork around recycling (no need to find out whether a disposable cup is recyclable or not) and decreasing the trips to the hard-to-recycle collection sites.”
― Bea Johnson, Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste

“Many people confuse the terms reuse and recycle, but they differ greatly in terms of conservation. Recycling is best defined as reprocessing a product to give it a new form. Reusing, on the other hand, is utilizing the product in its original manufactured form several times to maximize its usage and increase its useful life, therefore saving the resources otherwise lost through the process of recycling.”
― Bea Johnson, Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste

“Recycling currently depends on too many variables to make it a dependable solution to our waste problems.”
― Bea Johnson, Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste

“Imagine a world where things are fixed one more time than they are broken.”
― Laura Kampf

“Death is recycling. Proteins and nutrients, ’round and ’round. And you can’t stop that. Take a living person off Earth, put them in a sealed metal canister out in a vacuum, take them so far away from their planet of origin that they might not understand what a forest or an ocean is when you tell them about one – and they are still linked to that cycle. When we decompose under the right conditions, we turn into soil – something awfully like it, anyway. You see? We’re not detached from Earth. We turn into earth.”
― Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few

“The 400% Kindness Return: A True Story
I firmly believe that every act of kindness ripples out into the world, returning to you multiplied. Here's a story that forever changed how I see generosity.
A Mother's Sacrifice: Sarah, a single mother of two young children, knew every penny counted. Collecting aluminum cans with her kids was a small but essential way they scraped by. Trips to the recycling center were hard-earned rewards.”
― Cecilia Payne Kat Kaelin

“Boomers have a lot of time and money, and they like things that reflect well on themselves. A great deal of their choices are shaped by how they’re perceived by others. Recycling is the perfect storm for all these urges. Doing it completely requires time. To purchase food items in the right packages requires money. And it is a virtuous activity that they can promote. It ticks all the boxes.”
― I.M. Millennial, A Year in Boomertown: A Memoir

“(Bookseller puts book that the customer has bought into a paper bag)
CUSTOMER: Don’t you have a plastic bag? I’m sick of all this recycling nonsense. It’s not doing any of us any good.”
― Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

“A very old wisteria rose snaking over an arbour. Nearby were tiny roses on a wall, mere tufty buttons that smelled of one's childhood in a horse-pace village. Thin bricks were set on edge around a bed of irises, bricks which had been stamped on by Tudor horses, when they had formed the floor of the old stables. Traces of them could be seen also in the path in the churchyard, like the backs of small old books packed in a bookshelf.”
― Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook

“She had to get to the essence of the thing—to feel with her hands the undoing, and watch with her own eyes the reconnection.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“Earth is home to over 8 million species, and the waste produced by all 8 million go back into the soil nourishing nature instead of doing harm, except for one lifeform - can you guess which one?”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop