Recycling is more popular than ever, not only for those in the sustainability industry but also for consumers, who are increasingly learning about eco-friendly alternatives to dispose of products. It’s a feel-good concept that suggests that we are being responsible for the environment.
However, recycling is increasingly influenced by numerous factors that present important challenges to organizations with a stake in the responsible management of the end-of-life products worldwide. From measuring the success of recycling programs to managing the increasing demand for tailored solutions, recycling should not be examined in a vacuum but instead as part of a larger system where costs, energy use, and greenhouse gases, among other elements, are considered.
As the leading North American battery stewardship organization, we recognize the challenges of recycling and the larger issue of product stewardship. To better explore these changing dynamics and share our insights from more than 20 years of battery stewardship, we’ve commissioned a white paper entitled:聽Shifting the Focus from End-Of-Life Recycling to Continuous Product Lifecycles.
The white paper explores two important concepts that are becoming vital to the recycling and product stewardship sectors:
- Sustainable Materials Management聽(SMM) involves evaluating how materials can be reused during their entire lifecycle while minimizing associated environmental impacts. 聽The way materials and products are managed–ranging from an eco-conscious design to anticipating the way that consumers will dispose of the product– requires a larger set of objectives to balance trade-offs involved in the recycling of materials.
- The Circular Economy聽calls for evaluating reuse, repair, refurbishing, and recycling as part of a larger approach to advance common goals. For example, when batteries are recycled, its by-products later used in fertilizer production, and their by-products no longer being reused, should these batteries be characterized as being part of the circular economy? Is the environmental footprint inferior to a battery that is recycled and its by-products used to manufacture new batteries? Several U.S. organizations have defined and implemented an approach that examines materials management as a whole, including environmental effects such as costs of habitat, etc.
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