The recycling movement has gathered plenty of steam in recent years which is wonderful as there is far less waste hitting our landfills and far more resources being reclaimed.
However, there is concern building that the recycling wave is allowing us to still be rampant consumers, a throwaway society; and recycling some justification for maintaining this mindset.
Take for example those very handy cans of gourmet tuna. These are great to pack in a lunch box but I can empty the contents with a single mouthful! I can alleviate my guilt somewhat by recycling the can, but in order to get that mouthful of tuna, an awful lot of resources have gone into the packaging - and that's not to mention the added costs in purchasing products using "convenience packaging".
What's more economical and energy efficient is buying a larger can of tuna and spooning out the equivalent amount into a reusable container. The only problem there is if the contents of the larger can aren't eaten - and food waste is another massive environmental problem.
It's the same sort of situation with a plethora of other products - cans vs. large bottles of drink, traveller packs of anything - all these handy sizes which cost us more can be recycled; but we forget the amount of energy it takes to do so.
While the energy required to recycle the aluminum in a drink can is one twentieth of that to produce the can from raw materials; when you start thinking in terms of billions of cans; it's still a lot of energy consumed. You can buy the equivalent of 5 cans in a plastic PET recyclable bottle and I suspect (I'm not sure on this) that the recycling process would require less energy (although PET bottles are actually downcycled).
The downcycling aspect is another trap many of us fall into - downcycling is different to recycling in that the packaging being processed is made into something of less value. True recycling is where more of the same product is made; but the term has been extended to cover a variety of different actions.
