In Episode 555, I mention sources about the origins and usefulness (or lack thereof) of recycling:
- The origins of anti-litter campaigns. Basically a corporate strategy to shift the cost of reusability from the corporate income statement onto the communities. This is called “externalizing costs,” when a company finds a way to shift their costs to someone else (all of us) while keeping the profits.
- Dr. Max Liboiron, director of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) in Newfoundland discusses that recycling doesn’t make a difference, if you look at the actual data. The solution isn’t to try to get communities to recycle; the solution is to get producers to stop using plastic. (The same is true for global warming, by the way. Unless the top 100 CO2 emitters decide to stop, no amount of consumer action will change the fundamental trend.)