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

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

“Societies only have waste products while acquiring fresh raw material remains a cheaper option than recycling.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, The Naked God

“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

“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

“A Green Song
(to sing at the bottle-bank)

One green bottle,
Drop it in the bank.
Ten green bottles,
What a lot we drank.
Heaps of bottles
And yesterday's a blank.
But we'll save the planet,
Tinkle, tinkle, clank!

We've got bottles -
Nice, percussive trash.
Bags of bottles
Cleaned us out of cash.
Empty bottles,
We love to hear them smash
And we'll save the planet,
Tinkle, tinkle, crash!”
― Wendy Cope

“You mustn’t throw them away. Let me have them.”
― Diane Samuels, Kindertransport: A Drama

“If this had been a public-school locker room, there would have been some gray jumbo-sized garbage cans nearby, and I probably could've taken care of cleanup by myself. But apparently the girls of St. Andrew's don't throw anything away, because all they had was a tiny wastebasket and some recycling bins. There were bins for paper, plastic, and glass, but none for rotting corpses. Go figure.”
― James Ponti, Dead City

“In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?”
― Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

“We really never, never threw anything away. You think you know about recycling? We invented it. We had to. We were desperate. Sometimes maybe the only thing we had to work with was a couple of leftover baked potatoes from the weekend, and that was all there was to eat. Didn't matter to us that much. Ma just baked them again. Twice-Baked Potatoes really were kind of a treat for us, and we'd never complain when she served them.”
― Clara Cannucciari, Clara's Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression

“It started as a selfish act and has turned into a way of life. I can't stand to watch someone throw anything away that belongs in my green bin.”
― Jen Hatmaker

“How is the ocean not enraged,
swelling—
how is it not furious with grief:
we have drowned it in plastic,
its waves are no longer its own.
How does it survive this,
blistered by our carelessness?
We are drops of the ocean:
why can’t we see this?

—when plastic outnumbers fish”
― Ashley Asti, The Moon and Her Sisters

“This little piggy saved some water,
This little piggy biked for sun,
This little piggy used windmills,
This little piggy used sun,
And this little piggy squealed
'Re-re-recycle!'
All the way home.”
― Jan Peck and David Davis illustrated by Carin Berger

“Since 1963, LEGO bricks have been manufactured from acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene copolymer - ABS copolymer for short - a plastic with a matte finish. It is very hard and robust - import criteria for a children's toy. Laboratories in Switzerland and Denmark regularly test the quality of the ABS. The plastic is distributed to factories as granules rather than in liquid form. These grains of plastic are heated up to 232ºC and converted into a molten mass. Injection moulding machines weighing up to 150 tonnes squeeze the viscous plastic mass into the desired injection moulds - of which there are 2,400 varieties. After seven seconds, the brick produced in this way has cooled down enough to be removed from the mould. The injection moulding method is so precise that out of every million elements produced, only about 18 units have to be rejected. Unsold bricks are converted back into granulates and recycled.”
― Christian Humberg, 50 Years of the Lego Brick [With 6 Legos]

“Take it all, all of it!" Greg cried out. "These things here...I've been making them better, fixing them. It doesn't matter...they don't matter. I've been here before." He paused to try to collect himself. "It's my past, my present...these things--" He lifted a hand out to the objects around him. "These things are me." Now whispering, "Can't you see me?”
― Dayna Rubin, Running Parallel

“I'm not out there suggesting that we should ban every plastic product. But there are some whose environmental costs exceed their utility, and the [plastic] bag is one of them.”
― Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

“One of the reasons that the area would never be renovated, however, was the council’s insistence that each house had three large plastic trash-bins on wheels, each a bright color: green for the bottles left over from last night’s drunken orgy, red for stolen goods now surplus to requirements, purple for dead bodies and used syringes, all in fact that a modern British urban household needs to disembarrass itself of.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Farewell Fear

“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

“Do not throw me out. Please.”
― Diane Samuels, Kindertransport: A Drama

“If one cares about the earth—if one respects nature—it is better to consume vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains. If you care about the planet and wish to adopt an earth-friendly lifestyle, it is advisable to focus only secondarily on the car that you drive, or recycling, or turning off lights and turning down heat, and primarily on what you buy at the grocery store. What we eat has a much greater impact on the environment.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Animals and World Religions

“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