Adopted on a broad scale, the impact will ripple backward, encouraging manufacturers to use less packaging and to make products with ease of recycling in mind. We should buy goods and packaging with a high recycled content. The biggest problem faced by recycling is not the technological process of turning one thing into another. Anything can be recycled-and would be if demand for what it could be recycled into were great enough. The key, then, is demand, and demand for many recyclables is often soft.
Consumers can increase demand of buying wisely.
But to do so they will have to become garbage literate, because labels can be deceptive. Anything above 10 percent is worthwhile. In many cases they do not even closely approximate each other. This conclusion has emerged time and again form Garbage Project studies. That is not the usual starting point of most discussions in America, especially political ones.