IT’S KUHL TO RECYCLE: Rethinking Recycling
Do We Need All That Packaging?
by Mark Kuhl
For the GPHN
If you’ve read these recycling tips in the Greater Park Hill News over the last couple years, you may have concluded that much effort is required to identify what can be recycled. It’s worth the extra effort to increase your recycling rate beyond what you toss in the purple bin and future generations will thank you for that, including your attention to the first 2 R’s: Reduce and Reuse.
Wouldn’t it be helpful if companies made their products more recyclable so we could therefore increase our recycling rate? This idea has been named EPR — Extended Producer Responsibility — and is gaining traction in state capitols across the country.
Today, producers have little responsibility for the reuse, recycling, or disposal of products they sell. The burden instead falls on taxpayers and our environment. Baby steps have been made with producers taking responsibility for paint, batteries and some electronics, but only in a handful of states. This will soon expand as legislators in a dozen states have been developing comprehensive EPR legislation with stakeholders. The expectation is to encourage companies to rethink product design and packaging to ultimately decrease what we send to the landfill.
Mark Kuhl is an environmental advocate who lives in Park Hill with his family. His handy tips and news about recycling household items appear every month in these pages. A directory of his past columns for recycling everything from paint to Styrofoam to shoes is at greaterparkhill.org/sustainability/recycling-directory/.