“Just 43% of respondents agreed with the statement “If I learned that a product I regularly use was not eco-friendly, I would stop buying it.” At the same time, 43% said they would pay more for a magazine printed on recycled paper, while 39% said they would pay more for a magazine committed to eco-friendly practices.”

“The press release, titled “UPM swaps the road for the river in France,” outlined the use of river barges to carry finished paper products from the UPM Chapelle Darblay mill in Rouen to the end-users in the Paris area. The barge then returns to the mill loaded with a shipment of waste paper from collection centers in Paris. Using this recovered paper, UPM manufactures paper rolls which are then used by the printers of the major daily newspapers in Paris. The finished paper rolls are transported along the same waterway system.”

“[W]aste is integral to what Robert Reich, in his most recent book, calls “supercapitalism”. Unchecked supercapitalism produces waste as inevitably as it produces inequality, job insecurity, loss of community and so on. We are rapidly reaching the point, long promised by futurologists, where we throw away clothes after wearing them once, and we already dispose of many electrical goods as soon as they go wrong.”

“Recycling - a term that did not take on its current meaning until the 1970s [29] - is akin to a retronym. Retronyms like land line and acoustic guitar are applied retrospectively and retroactively after some new development (here, cell phones and electric guitars) makes their invention necessary for clarity’s sake. So, when we realized that a garbage can or the town dump could essentially be reopened as a mine, we christened it “recycling.” Recycling signifies not a new attitude toward resources, but the large-scale discovery of new metal “deposits.” Recycling (as opposed to reuse) does not emerge as a concept until the idea of Garbage is so well established that most people cannot imagine life without it.”

“A total of 4.7 million tonnes of used paper and 0.5 million tonnes of used plastic were exported, with China the recipient of half the paper and 80 per cent of the plastic.
But the WRAP study found that under current conditions, this is the most carbon effective way of dealing with the waste.
Recycling waste is sent to China in containers which would otherwise make the return trip empty because there are more Chinese imports coming to the UK than exports to china.”