haley bowcock

I recently rediscovered Annie Leonard’s brilliant ‘The Story of Stuff’, an animated feature that compels us to think about the impacts on planet and people of the myriad stuff we buy, use and ultimately throw away. In it, Annie explains how while recycling is great, it cannot be the only solution to dealing with the stuff we throw away. This is because even if we were able to recycle 100 percent of an unwanted product, this wouldn’t account for the waste created in its lifecycle. According to Annie, for every waste bin’s worth of stuff we throw away, 70 additional bins of waste were generated to make the stuff in the first place!

This got me thinking about the ways in which recycling has dominated what I will call our waste management ‘collective consciousness’. It does seem to be the most common answer to the question: ‘What shall I do with this stuff that I no longer want?’ Besides the odd charity clothes drop-off bins next to glass collection points in supermarket car parks, when was the last time you saw a ‘reuse’ bin in the street? Not recently, I’d guess; if at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not dismissing the role of recycling in dealing with the environmental impacts of stuff we no longer want. But if we solely focus on recycling, we are literally wasting opportunities, since all too often much of the stuff we throw away still has a useful life that could be extended by the original owner (Couldn’t we all just wait another year to replace that iPod? Those trainers?). Or it could be offered up for reuse by someone else.

That way, we are avoiding the need to extract more raw materials to make new stuff, or to submit the old stuff to a–sometimes costly and not always perfect–recycling process. And we are doing justice to those 70 bins’ worth of waste that went into the making of each one bin of stuff, in the first place.

Legislators are aware of all of this. This is why waste is often regulated in terms of a ‘waste hierarchy’, which ranks preferred options for waste management in terms of net environmental benefit. In this hierarchy, reuse sits higher up than recycling. There may be times, when we look at the entire lifecycle of some products, that the hierarchy will not hold, but in the vast majority of products we can be confident that it does.

  Let’s take the case of a common consumer item – the personal computer. Unlike some other electronics, the energy intensity of a PC is highly concentrated in the production phase, rather than the use phase. A whopping 80 percent of a PC’s energy use is accounted for before it is even switched on.[1] This is due to the complexity of its interior parts, like printed wiring boards, superconductors and memory chips. 

Compare this to another common electronic item, the refrigerator, in which 80 to 90 percent of energy is used in running it. For refrigerators, activities that improve use-phase energy consumption, like the design of a newer, more efficient machine makes the most environmental sense. But for computers, making energy efficiency improvements in the use-phase will not have the same impact; it is activities that extend the use-phase and avoid unnecessary, energy- and materials-hungry manufacture that will lead to the most benefit, such as reuse.

There is huge scope for reusing unwanted ICTs, as they are often replaced long before the end of their productive lives, due to rapid product innovation and consumer desires for the latest model. Unwanted ICTs, however, often end up in landfill or enter recycling chains. While there are environmental and human health benefits to safely the recycling end-of-life electronics, these are less pronounced for unwanted ICTs that are yet to reach the end of their productive lives. In fact, empirical research has indicated that reusing a computer is up to 20 times more energy efficient than recycling it.[2]

So, reuse should be promoted and where shown to be the most beneficial waste management option, like with ICT equipment and many other unwanted consumer items, maximised. Fortunately, there are recent developments that suggest reuse may be getting the recognition it deserves. For instance, in the UK, an extensive reuse network has been established in London, endorsed by not only the mayor, but the ‘absolutely fabulous’ Joanna Lumley.

Also, the EU’s Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is undergoing a recast, in which there are proposals to include a discrete reuse target. This is an attempt to move away from a situation where collection systems for e-waste are not only geared towards recycling, as is commonly currently the case, despite the fact that the language of the Directive suggests that reuse should be prioritised.

Hopefully these, and other movements, are an indication that reuse is starting to move higher up the hierarchy of our waste management collective consciousness.

For more details on why to reuse and not recycle functional ICT equipment, see the Special Report: Why reuse is better than recycling, by Computer Aid International.

[1] See Kuehr, R. et al. 2003. Computers and the environment–an introduction to understanding and managing their impacts. In Kuehr R. and E. Williams (Eds.) Computers and the Environment: Understanding and measuring their impacts. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 1-16 

[2] Ibid.