Recycle,+Reuse,+or+Neither

=Reuse, Recycling, or Neither?= By Jamie Johnson

It is always a question: Which is better when it comes to plastics? Reuse, recycling, or neither. However, it is not a simple question.

To truly understand the question and figure out the answer, one needs to look at all the aspects of each.

Reuse. It has been championed as the ways to reduce waste. Instead of throwing out or recycling that plastic bottle, you can reuse it another day, meaning you won’t have to buy another one that day.

Reuse completely keeps materials out of the waste stream for as long as you reuse them. The longer you keep that water bottle around, the less its going to pollute.

There are no resources required to reuse something. Nothing has to be transported to a recycling plant, or, God forbid, a trash barge.

Also, you can reuse things regardless of what type of plastic it. Anything from 1 to 8 and beyond can be reused as long as it is still in good shape. In Pennington, only plastics labeled 1 and 2 can be recycled.

In addition, when you reuse something, it means that you don’t have to buy that things again.

Then, when you yourself can’t reuse an item, there are other ways to go about doing it. One such way id freecycle.com where people list items that they need to get rid of and people who need that item then go pick it up from them.

However, when reusing, there are some things that need to be taken into account.

For one, there is the sanitation aspect. When reusing water bottles, you need to be extra careful to clean it thoroughly with warm water and soap or else you’re making it more likely that bacterial could be growing in the bottle.

Also, there is the controversy surrounding the idea that plastics, when being reused, break down more and leech more of the plastic into he water. However, this has little substantial evidence behind this idea.

Recycling, on the other hand, can be considered very different from reuse although the two are presumed by some to be almost interchangeable.

Recycling, for one, is very selective, as mentioned before, many places only allow for the recycling of plastics labeled either 1 or 2. This means that the other plastics have to be thrown in the brown bin instead (or, they could be reused).

Whole Foods is able to recycle plastics labeled with the number 5 and turn them into plastic toothbrushes. However, not many people know this or are able to take advantage of it

The recycling of products requires moderately extensive transportation. Plastics need to be shipped to one of the recycling plant nearby. Then it also is laborious to sort through the plastics. However this does create jobs.

It also uses up excessive amounts of energy to recycle plastic and the plastic product created will always be a lower grade than the one it was created from. This means that every time it gets more and more difficult to recycle it.

There are also some items that are difficult to reuse so they should be recycled. Plastic shopping bags, for example, after a few uses

While reuse may seem like it is significantly better than recycling, recycling is a much better alternative to throwing things in the trash where it just goes away to a landfill.

However, maybe the best alternative is to simply curb one’s use of plastics. Bring reusable cloth or alternative bags to the grocery store or even to the mall. Use glass instead of plastic water bottles, and avoid most forms of plastic. This will often last better than plastic, and don’t have the dilemmas associated with plastic.