Products and Recycling

Products and Recycling

A product is an article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale. An environmentally friendly product is are sustainability and marketing terms referring to goods and services, laws, guidelines and policies that claim reduced, minimal, or no harm upon ecosystems or the environment.

Recycling is to convert (waste) into reusable material. Tips on reducing waste and conserving resources. The three R's - reduce, reuse and recycle - all help to cut down on the amount of waste we throw away. They conserve natural resources, landfill space and energy. Plus, the three R's save land and money communities must use to dispose of waste in landfills.

The Three R's

Growing up in a city like New York, recycling was taught from a young age and strictly enforced in our communities. Today, the city is not only over populated but people still make it part of their lifestyle to recycle. Each household is given three stickers for "regular" trash, "plastic" and paper. As of 2016, each home is given a compost garbage can and strictly enforced to encourage homeowners to make sure only food wastes and scrapes are placed in the brown compost bins. They are picked up twice weekly and if not stored correctly, the home will be fined. This makes New Yorkers not only want to recycle, but have to recycle. The more we can keep our planet clean, the more we can reuse. As the presentation stated in class, we need to "rethink" what we will do after we finish reusing, reducing and recycling the product.

Productivity Use

I enjoyed listening and learning about different and varies uses of products that can be reused multiple times over. I enjoyed learning about how to get longevity use out of products that I use everyday. For example, when other classmates noted that in order to not waste a multitude of products such as using mason jars or getting meat wrapped in paper products, we are lowering and cutting costs on recycling and more on reusing. These are better ways and more sustainable affects than using plastic and foam.

Waste Packaging

The presentations in class talked a lot about the amount of waste packaging alone creates.  I personally work at a nutrition store and had never really thought about the packaging of items until now.  Companies try to make the jugs of protein look as big as they can so that customers think they are getting a lot, but in reality the container is only half full if even that much.  Many bottles of pills also come in a box.  What is the point of putting a bottle of pills into a box also?  They are already packaged in the bottle.  There is no logical reason why companies use extra unnecessary materials other than the fact that they believe it will help them sell more of the product.  Greedy people are wasting resources and creating more trash that pollutes our planet for the simple reason of gaining more money.  One classmate discussed how the store she worked for would reuse boxes multiple times.  This is a great way to reduce waste and I believe more stores should do it.  My store receives the boxes and throws them all away right after they are unpacked.  They are used only once.  This is a huge amount of waste that could easily be avoided.

Making Life More Sustainable

This class we learned about sustainable products and waste/recycling. When dealing with product design manufacturers are starting to focus on making products and packaging that can be reused from the very beginning, with a train of thought called cradle-to-cradle. This means that instead of making the products biodegradable, they're designed from the ground up to be directly recycled back into itself for re-manufacturing. Research and development for a lot of these companies are also using biomimicry to improve the efficiency of their products. Since evolution naturally creates the most efficient features over millions of years, it's only natural to look at nature for inspiration. 

When we learned about waste and recycling, I thought it was pretty crazy that there is a giant accumulation of trash floating around the Pacific that's literally named The Great Pacific Garbage Patch... Which is exactly what it sounds like. Another thing that surprised me was the high percent of our country's total trash is made up of construction and demolition materials