Beyond Recycling: Getting to 'Zero Waste'

Scrap cars on docks in Liverpool, England, will be exported to foundries and metal merchants abroad. The global price of scrap and recycled metal has soared due to the scarcity of raw materials and demand from China and other developing countries.

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Recycling newspaper and plastic can only go so far toward achieving a "zero-waste" world, recycling activist Eric Lombardi says. The next step, he says, is getting industry and government to work together to make going greener more profitable.

Lombardi has been into recycling ever since his first job — at his father's computer card company in the 1960s.

"We used to go to the local paper recycler with the old punch cards and he used to pay my dad for the old cards," he says. "I looked at that and went, 'I thought that was trash.' And my dad's like, 'Oh no, they make paper out of paper."

Lombardi, who now directs the nonprofit, Eco-Cycle, in Boulder, Colo., says the community has a comprehensive approach to creating "zero waste or what we call darn-near." That is, "to try and recover darn-near everything in your trash can because it's all made out of some basic materials: metals, plastic, glass, paper," he tells Steve Inskeep. "The next revolution," Lombardi says, is organic material to make compost for soil.

Boulder's Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials (CHaRM) opens its doors to one new material each year. The center takes in a variety of items, including porcelain sinks and toilets, home audio equipment and cooking oil. "We collect a lot of strange things at the CHaRM," Lombardi says.

The 1987 story of the Long Island barge that floated for thousands of miles because no city would accept its garbage led to the perception that there is a landfill crisis, Lombardi says.

"We never had a landfill crisis," he says. "What we have is a resource-efficiency crisis. There are resource wars going around the planet right now to get the raw materials that are being destroyed in our landfills and our incinerators."

The resources include trees in Indonesia, minerals in Africa and oil in the Middle East, he says. "It is not easy to get resources anymore."

"Getting us close to zero waste means that we need to work with industry to start designing their products and packaging for recovery rather than for the dump," Lombardi says.

In Europe, for example, automakers have been nudged by law to increase the materials that can be recycled in their cars, he says.

"Actually, big business understands this better than big government does," Lombardi says. "We're waiting for big government to get the concept here that waste is expensive — it is inefficient. So I look very much forward to the captains of industry getting together with the leaders in government and creating a system so that greener becomes more profitable."

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