Differences Between Reusing and Recycling

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) promotes a "reduce, reuse, recycle" campaign to decrease the amount of trash dumped into landfills. While the concept of reducing waste production is fairly straightforward -- decrease the amount of trash that needs managing by, for example, buying products with less packaging -- the other two terms sometimes are used interchangeably when they really refer to different processes with different outcomes.

Reuse

• Reuse means to extend the life of a single product without changing it, although that product's purpose might change. Take a plastic grocery bag, for example. Its first and main use is to tote groceries from the store to home. Once emptied of those groceries, the bag can be used again to tote a lunch to work, to haul projects to school or to clean up after the dog on his morning walk. The bag was reused without any processing necessary. Even better, a reusable cloth grocery bag can tote new loads of groceries week after week. Other examples of reuse include selling or donating clothes and toys that children have outgrown or salvaging antique furniture or old wood from abandoned buildings.

Recycle

• Recycling means to process an item into a new material. Take that same plastic grocery bag. After a few uses leaves it damaged and no longer functional, the bag can be tossed into a recycling bin and shipped off to a recycling center where it is cleaned, sorted and processed into basic materials. Manufacturers buy those materials and use them to make new products, such as new grocery bags, composite lumber and plastic crates. Some other products that are recycled or made from recycled materials include printer ink cartridges and toner, paper towels, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, copy paper, cardboard, motor oil, facial tissue, shoe soles, tires and insulation.

Hierarchy

• The EPA promotes its waste conservation campaign as a three-tiered hierarchy, with reduce being the first and best option. By purchasing in bulk or having their names removed from junk mailing lists, for example, consumers can reduce the amount of trash they need to manage. Second best is reuse. Extending the lifetime of a product keeps it out of the landfill, at least temporarily, without the expenditure of additional resources. For the consumer, reuse often saves the cost of replacing the product or buying it new. Third tier is recycling. Although additional resources are needed to reprocess the product, the efforts do reduce the amount of waste dumped in a landfill and result in functional, marketable products. Recycling used items like paper also saves on the consumption of raw resources like trees.

Complications

• The government promotes "reduce" instead of "eliminate" because society and technology are imperfect and waste cannot be eliminated completely. Moving along to the next step in the hierarchy, reuse also implies limitations as not every object is suitable for reuse. Materials degrade, become contaminated or simply stymie even a creative mind determined to devise a second use. Spoiled food, for example, presents no obvious reuse alternatives -- although compost is sometimes an option. This leads to the third tier, recycling, which poses its own drawbacks in terms of energy consumed and waste produced. Again, degraded material is a problem and often results in "downcycling," where the product is recycled into a lower-grade product instead of the same product or one of equal quality High-grade paper often is recycled into newsprint, and plastic food or drink bottles may be recycled into containers for nonfood-grade products.