Craft:

Nope, recycling is when you break something all the way down (in this case, to paper pulp) and make something new from it.

Here's another example: if you take an empty glass bottle and use it as a vase, you are not recycling. Heck, if you refill the bottle, you're still not recycling. You have to melt the old bottle down and make a new glass object with it for it to be recycled.

The eco-movement has spawned a lot of things that claim to be recycled when they are not. If you want to tread lightly on the planet then you should "reduce, reuse, recycle", IN THAT ORDER. Reducing is best of all, reusing is great, and while recycling is definitely better than throwing things away, it is not what is going to "save the planet". Recycling still requires a large amount of energy and raw materials to work. It should be lowest on the priority list. Something like the project above is BETTER than recycling.

By using "recycle" as a catch-all term to encompass reuse, rework (and sometimes even just plain "used"), the issue becomes distorted, and it becomes harder to understand how our choices impact the world around us.

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Posted by: Natalie Zee Drieu on March 24, 2009 at 12:04 PM

Of course it is recycling since you aren't throwing it away -- you're turning it into something new. Some people call it "upcycling" now.

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That's not recycling.

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