The Future Of Recycling?

This spring, I took part in two recycling conferences. There was obviously a lot of talk there about recycling, but fortunately, there were plenty of people focused on reuse too. I had a lot of uplifting conversations with people making great strides with reuse solutions for our waste problem and I'm already in the works to collaborate with some of them.

But even after these conferences in 2026, I'm still asking the same question that I've been asking for nearly two decades. Why is recycling so much more focused on than reuse?

Is taking a glass bottle that was used once and sending it to a recycler to break it down and make the same exact bottle again really better than washing the bottle and using it again? Is that a better use of time, money, and resources? The answer has been obvious to me for years and it still is. NO! Recycling has a place. But it's not the place that we've been led to believe. Sure, as I'm going through an unearthed box of my old school papers, there isn't a good reuse solution for many of them, so recycling is a good option. And paper recycling has actually been done well. But I'm certainly saving a lot of it for scrap paper or to print on. Fun fact: I haven't bought a new ream of paper in over 18 years.

Some of my old school papers that I've been sorting.

One thing that I heard people talking about at the conferences was the "the future of recycling." There was discussion about new machinery, investments in technology for recycling plants, etc. But the future of recycling can't just keep moving forward in the name of "progress." We can't just turn our back to the past. It's imperative that we pause, look back, and reflect.

We can't continue to perpetuate single use items because they "can" be recycled. The 50+ year trial run hasn't worked even remotely close to what it was set out to do. Just like we can't manufacture our way out of this waste mess, we can't recycle our way out of it either.

The future of recycling is looking back to times when recycling didn't exist and seeing what worked for hundreds of years.

The future of recycling is promoting recycling as the solution that comes after reusing existing things as much as possible.

The future of recycling is simply realizing that recycling has a place, but it's not at the top.

You can take a deeper dive into the recycling vs reuse battle in my series of Recycling is Overrated blog posts here.