Ethical Recycling

  Because I am so interested in promoting the concept of Ethical Food here in the U.S., I monitor news stories for use of the term. Ninety percent of what I see is from the U.K., most of the rest is from other European countries or Australia and New Zealand. There is almost never a mention of Ethical Food in the U.S. media. If there is one, it is more often than not a result from this website.

This morning I noticed the phrase "ethical recycling" in one of the stories that I had found. I also noticed that the company using the term was from the U.S. Taking a look, I was surprised to learn that learn that the phrase ethical recycling had no green connotations at all. Basically what it meant is that this company has new technology that will destroy and recycle documents or books without any human involvement. This eliminates privacy and unethical resale concerns people have about shipping their content off for recycling. I guess this is sort of like a huge version of the paper shredder you have in your home or office.

In the first three months of this year the company destroyed more that 4.2 million pounds of books, catalogs, corporate reports, and other bound and unbound documents. Somehow they are able to grind up the entire product, regardless of whether it includes content like CD’s, metal or plastic binding, or plastic page inserts. They claim that after the destruction process, 100% is recycled, nothing goes to the landfill. They do not indicate how or into what the resulting material is recycled.

Still, this is apparently great progress as other document destruction companies have to use humans to separate out the original material into categories. Then everything other than the paper content goes to the landfill. I had no idea document destruction was such a huge industry. There is even an organization called "The National Association for Information Destruction", that has its own code of ethics. It is interesting to see that the marketing of these services is now including the fact that all of the material can be recycled. Sometimes progress comes in areas you did not even know existed.