The Ecology of Recycling

While not on the front line 
of climate solutions, recycling of waste materials, wastewater, and wasted energy is a locally available and highly desirable means of reducing greenhouse gases. One potent greenhouse gas, the methane emitted from landfills and wastewater, accounts for about 90 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from the entire waste sector. That amount is 18 per cent of human-caused methane emissions globally and about three per cent of total greenhouse gases, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.1 Diverting waste bound for landfills and putting it to good use, then, is an obvious and proven means for conserving land and resources, as we have known for a long time; we can now add the knowledge from numerous studies that these practices also bolster climate protection.
This article draws on examples from around the world to describe the climate effects of 1) household recycling and reuse, 2) the cyclic resource flows across clusters of companies known as “industrial symbiosis”, and 3) far reaching policy proposals for national scale resource use. It draws lessons from the system’s perspective provided by industrial ecology, a new field resolutely focused on the flows of material, energy, and water through systems at different scales, from products to factories to countries and regions.
How does resource reuse affect climate? Cycling energy through cogeneration, reuse of agricultural wastes, or recovery of energy-intensive materials such as aluminum, reduces greenhouse gases. Since most commercial energy is produced from burning fossil fuels, the power generation sector emits more greenhouse gases than any other industrial sector. Cycling materials for use in other production processes reduces the life cycle impacts, when compared with virgin materials that must be extracted from the earth and then transformed and transported through numerous stages. Recovered resources free up land and capital for other opportunities that would have been required for the equivalent amount of goods to be made from virgin resources. Cycling water means using it more than once, a critical and increasingly urgent practice where water is scarce owing to expected changes in precipitation patterns brought on by climate change. To capture these concepts, industrial ecologists use the term “embedded utility”: the total amount of the water, energy, and materials used for all different life cycle stages of a product from beginning to end.2 Embedded utility is central to industrial ecology: if a product is land-filled, these resources are lost.
Household Waste and Recycling
Study after study in the last five years from Brazil to Canada and from Europe to Asia affirms the ability to quantify greenhouse gas emissions from household waste on a life cycle basis. Each of these lifecycle studies finds a clear, positive impact of recycling and reuse on reducing greenhouse gasses, principally because of recapturing, rather than discarding, the embedded energy, water, and materials used to make the products in the first place. These studies have included “upstream” (production stage) impacts, such as the effect of replacing virgin materials with recycled ones, as well as “downstream” (waste management) impacts that result from alternative strategies such as land-filling, incineration, composting and recycling. The sum of upstream and downstream amount to a dual benefit from recycling. Even when the emissions from collection trucks and additional transport to recycling facilities are included, greenhouse gas savings prevail.
The scale and mechanism of greenhouse gas reductions for a particular location, however, depend on the specific materials involved, the extent of recovery, the availability of markets, and the mix of fuels avoided through recycling of resources. Recycling metals carries a large energy benefit, while paper recycling often contributes to forest carbon sequestration benefits. Replacing power generated by oil or coal, two carbon-intensive fuel sources, adds more greenhouse gas benefits to recycling than replacing power generated from renewables or hydro energy. Thus, there are no universal claims, but significant regional differences occur when measuring comparative climate impacts from waste recycling and disposal.
There are now many tools to calculate greenhouse gas impacts of different solid waste management options and materials. One example is the Environmental Benefits Calculator of the Northeast Recycling Council in the United Sates, which estimates the environmental benefits of a selected study area based on the tonnages of materials that are source reduced, reused, recycled, land-filled, or incinerated. The Calculator, a Microsoft Excel-based tool, incorporates findings from several life cycle studies based on “typical” facilities and operating characteristics in the United States.3 The Brazil study measured in detail the greenhouse gas impacts of individual materials, including aluminum, plastic, paper, steel and glass.4
With some exceptions for mixed or contaminated materials that are difficult to categorize or recycle, a broad array of policy programs is available to reduce climate-related impacts of waste management. Some of the most successful programs include recycling pick-up from homes or drop-off at district centers; requiring residents who generate a lot of waste to pay more than those who generate less (“pay as you throw”); instituting policies that originated in Europe and are diffusing quickly in Asia that require producers of goods to play a larger role in taking back products (extended producer responsibility); and assessing fees and taxes on categories of goods such as tires or batteries, or on landfill use overall.
**read the full article on UN Chronicle here
BM