There are significant environmental benefits associated with using recycled materials. This is a widely accepted, best-practice statement. However, on occasion, this general statement may be challenged by the specific details of a case example, like a product-level lifecycle analysis. As we know, there are often exceptions to the rule, and there are examples where the use of recycled materials may not result in the optimal benefit for that particular product. But that doesn't mean that the general rule doesn't hold.

There are many environmental, social and economic benefits of using recycled materials—from the conservation of virgin resources and energy to the diversion of materials from landfills. The list of benefits may vary, as well as the point in the lifecycle in which the benefit occurs. A commonly cited example is aluminum. Recycled aluminum requires 95-percent less energy per kilogram to produce than a kilogram of virgin aluminum. Beyond energy, the use of recycled aluminum conserves bauxite extraction, alumina production and aluminum smelting and all the cumulative environmental impacts, not to mention the transportation miles that are involved. From this perspective, using recycled aluminum helps minimize our current impacts based on the existing system. What if the scale of that system is growing like that of an industrializing planet. Is minimizing enough?

There is also another perspective on recycled materials. Using recycled materials sends a signal that materials are valuable, not just from an economic perspective but because of the investment in environmental impact made in their creation. From this perspective, the use of recycled materials is an investment in a longer-term strategy to drive system and economic change.

There is no doubt that raw materials industries are very environmentally impactful. However, there is also no doubt that they are the backbone of our industrialized society. So, where is the sustainability balance? It has to do with a perspective on time and whether we're designing for today's system versus creating an impetus for the more sustainable systems of tomorrow.

We have a woefully inadequate infrastructure for recycling today in the US, and no entity is stepping up to take the lead on helping to create a circular economy for the materials that make up our society. We do not even have a nationally recognized vision for what a sustainable-materials economy might look like. The Chinese adopted a framework for a circular economy in 2002. They purchase a lot of our post-consumer materials, use them as feedstocks in a new production cycle and make a lot of money selling them back to us.

Using recycled materials isn't only an essential part of a strategy to reduce our current footprint, but it's also a force to drive the change needed to engineer the systems that rationalize the economics of recycling, so that when we refer to sustainable packaging, it means an economic supply chain from cradle-to-cradle. Recycled materials are a part of a sustainable materials future. To learn more about circular economy, go to: www.chinacp.com/eng/index.html

434/817-1424, anne.johnson@greenblue.org