Before you go, here’s something to think about: recycling is actually at the bottom of the circular economy hierarchy.
Many people equate the circular economy with recycling — tossing items in the blue bin and hoping they’ll be reborn as something new. But the truth is, recycling alone doesn’t close the loop. Despite our best efforts, much of what we put in the recycling bin still ends up in landfills, the ocean, or even within our own ecosystems and bodies.
Take coffee cups, for example. Think about how many paper and plastic cups are thrown out every day at just one Tim Hortons in Calgary — then multiply that by the thousands of fast food chains operating worldwide. That’s a staggering amount of waste for something used for only a few minutes.
The City of Calgary accepts disposable paper coffee cups in blue cart recycling bins, but their plastic lids are too small to be captured by the city’s sorting systems. And even when cups are collected, they’re notoriously difficult to recycle. That’s because most are lined with a thin layer of polyethylene plastic to prevent leaks — a combination that makes them hard to separate and process, and ultimately, not recyclable everywhere.
As Gallina A. Vincelette, World Bank Country Director for the EU, put it:
“Our dominant ‘take-make-use-waste’ global economic model is unsustainable. Current global demand for natural resources exceeds our planet's regenerative capacity by a factor of 1.75; we simply do not have another planet.”
(EU Report, 2022)
So, if we really want to move toward a circular economy, we need to think beyond recycling. It starts with reducing, reusing, repairing, and rethinking our habits.
