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The following are some famous environmental quotes centered on the theme of Waste Management and Recycling. If you would like to go to the online environmental forum Click Here.
“Recycling just seems like the right thing to do, I mean really, it makes us responsible for the messes that we make. It’s all about just picking up after yourself, not shoving our trash in our oceans and streams. We might as well reuse it before we lose it.”
- Ed Begley Jr
“Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem.”
- Barry Commoner
“In a society where we think of so many things as disposable, where we expect to be constantly discarding last year's gadget and replacing it with this year's model, do we end up tempted to think of people and relationships as disposable? If we live in a context where we construct everything from computers to buildings to relationships on the assumption that they'll need to be replaced before long, what have we lost? God is involved in building to last. He doesn't give up on the material of human lives and He asks us to approach one another and our physical world with the same commitment. God doesn't do 'waste'.”
- Rowan Williams
“Recycling is often portrayed within environmentalist literature as integral to the conception of an alternative society founded on small-scale community based industries and commune type human settlements. The aims is to create self-sufficient sustainable urban communities based around local production for local consumption from local resources.”
- Matthew Gandy
“To achieve true sustainability, we must reduce our 'garbage index" - that which we permanently throw away into the environment that will not be naturally recycled for reuse - to near zero. Productive activities must be organized as closed systems. Minerals and other nonbiodegradable resources, once taken from the ground, must become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways that assure that they are absorbed back into the natural production system.”
- David Korten
“If the society toward which we are developing is not to be a nightmare of exhaustion, we must use the interlude of the present era to develop a new technology which is based on a circular flow of materials such that the only sources of man's provisions will be his own waste products.”
- Kenneth E. Boulding
“Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. In God, every end is converted into new means.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You can tell how high a society is by how much of its garbage is recycled.”
- Dhyani Ywahoo
“Most of us are familiar with recycle and reusing, but how often do we think of the third R - REDUCE? 'Reduce' is probably the most important of the three Rs because, if we reduced, it would limit the need to recycle and reuse.”
- Catherine Pulsifer
“We are not to throw away those things which can benefit our neighbor. Goods are called good because they can be used for good: they are instruments for good, in the hands of those who use them properly.”
- Clement of Alexandria
“The ever-mounting glut of waste materials is characteristic by-product of modern 'consumer society.' It might even be argued that capitalism's continual need to find of generate markets means that disposibility and waste have become the spine of the system. To consume means, literally, 'to destroy or expend,' and in the garbage crisis we confront the underlying truth of a society in which enormous productive capacities and market forces have harnessed human needs and desires, without regard to the long or even short-term future of life on the planet.”
- Stuart Ewen
“We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms, from landfills to Superfund cleanups, from deep-well injection to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.”
- Paul Hawken
“We tamper with nature at our peril, and home composting is about limiting the damage we do to the environment on a daily basis. By recycling our waste on our own property, and putting nutrients back into the earth, we take part in a natural cycle that we would otherwise interrupt. I’ve been home composting for years, and I firmly believe that it’s important for everyone to get involved – even if you don’t have a huge garden, you can still use the compost to grow herbs and pot plants. There’s just no excuse not to take part, and it’s fun!”
- Jenny Seagrove
“It is less difficult to seperate garbage than to find a new habitable planet.”
- Lucy Hawking
“There appears to be a deeply embedded uneasiness in our culture about throwing away junk that can be reused. Perhaps, in part, it is guilt about consumption. Perhaps it also feels unnatural. Mother Nature doesn't throw stuff away. Dead trees, birds, beetles and elephants are pretty quickly recycled by the system.”
- William Booth
“We are recycling not only to protect the environment, but for economic reasons as well. Disposal is simply too costly and too dangerous. The challenge is to redirect the flow of raw materials going to landfill into strengthening our declining local economies. The solution to pollution is self-reliant cities and counties.”
- Neil Seldman
“Source Reduction is to garbage what preventive medicine is to health.”
- William Rathje
“But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom—a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom—and all of us are involved in it.”
- Wendell Berry
“Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity.”
- E. Knight
“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller
“Home Composting is a really easy and cost effective way to give your garden the essential nutrients it needs, as well as improving the soil structure.”
- Chris Beardshaw
“Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.”
- Jesus Christ
“As long as man was small in numbers and limited in technology, he could realistically regard the earth as an infinite reservoir, an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool for outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth has become a space ship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social, biological, and physical system in which man is enmeshed. In what we might call the "old days," when man was small in numbers and earth was large, he could pollute it with impunity, though even then he frequently destroyed his immediate environment and had to move on to a new spot, which he then proceeded to destroy. Now man can no longer do this; he must live in the whole system, in which he must recycle his wastes and really face up to the problem of the increase in material entropy which his activities create. In a space ship there are no sewers.”
- Kenneth E. Boulding
“Recycling is more than just a response to the environmental crisis and has assumed a symbolic role in beginning to change the nature of western societies and the culture of consumerism. Indeed many environmentalists assume that there will be an inevitable shift from our "throwaway" society to a post-industrial "recycling" society of the future.”
- Matthew Gandy
“Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even 'upcycled' - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.”
- William McDonough and Michael Braungart
“Any realistic recycling scheme will require some form of prior separation, since any attempt to pick through significant quantities of crude waste for recoverables is both impossible and even potentially hazardous. So the waste producers must be encouraged to keep separate those items destined for recycling, and this in turn leads to separate collections or special vehicles, both expensive activities.”
- A.G. Manser
“Listen up, you couch potatoes: each recycled beer can saves enough electricity to run a television for three hours.”
- Denis Hayes
“It’s not often you get something for nothing in this world, but simply by recycling your fruit and vegetable peelings, along with tea bags and egg shells, you can produce a great garden fertiliser - absolutely free.”
- Philippa Forrester
“The case for recycling is strong. The bottom line is clear. Recycling requires a trivial amount of our time. Recycling saves money and reduces pollution. Recycling creates more jobs than landfilling or incineration. And a largely ignored but very important consideration, recycling reduces our need to dump our garbage in someone else's backyard.”
- David Morris
“Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.”
- Wendell Berry
“'Solid wastes' are the discarded leftovers of our advanced consumer society. This growing mountain of garbage and trash represents not only an attitude of indifference toward valuable natural resources, but also a serious economic and public health problem.”
- Jimmy Carter
“Wisdom understands that in a world of ecological interconnectedness there is no such things as 'away.' We don’t throw things 'away,' we simply put them someplace where they defile the land, foul the water, pollute the air or change the earth’s atmosphere.”
- Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat
“By composting you are not only converting organic waste into something useful, but by diverting it from landfill you are helping to reduce the creation of methane gas, one of the most potent triggers for climate change.”
- Penney Poyzer
“In industrial areas where appropriate soil is not readily available, the application of biosolids may be a chance to provide viable vegetation and with appropriate modification of topsoil it will give an opportunity for successful reclamation of toxic waste sites.”
- F. Pistelok
“Bin taxes would damage the local environment and public health by leading to a surge in fly-tipping and backyard burning and the poorest households would be hit the hardest by this highly regressive new tax”
- Eric Pickles