Nick Aster at TriplePundit connects to a story on Recyclebank by Forbes.
Remembering the environmentalist mantra for waste – “Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle, Refuse” recying is the 4th best alternative. Closed-loop manufacturing is far better in this scenario and changing people’s habits is the best.
RecycleBank works in the area of recylcing. It provides incentives to residents in Philadelphia, US to recycle their plastics, glass and other recyclables. It uses RFID tags to collect information.
RecycleBank tracks each household’s contribution by providing containers embedded with radio frequency identification tags that correspond to each household address. Scanners on sanitation trucks record the weights of each pickup in RecycleBank’s database. Each household gets an account number and can track their recycling points a la airline miles.
By providing a incentive it helps to encourage the idea of recycling. However, there is a problem.
The first one revolves around the idea of education. In the longer run, it makes sense to encourage recycling as a natural habit rather than incentivize it.
Second, Recycling only postpones the inevitable decline of products to waste. Recycling in that sense is not always the best option. In Cradle to Cradle, the authors provide an idea called “downcycling” where products, materials or flow of energy that is not useful in one process is transferred to another process which helps in reducing primary metals extraction, resource efficiency and sometimes energy efficiency. These refer to the “reuse” and sometimes “repair” in the waste mantra.
Incentives to increase recycling is good to a limit – at sometime we need to create a closed-loop cycle. More recycling means, more waste. Also, there are debates around the efficiency (in terms of energy use etc) of recycling for all products.
The bigger goal should be to change the design of products in such a way that products and its materials are re-used. The infrastructure and systems which are being developed by RecycleBank have the possibility to mature into a system which can help manufactures to reclaim their products in their goal towards close-loop systems.
