What is sustainability?

The EPA defines sustainability as the ability to achieve continuing economic prosperity while protecting the natural systems of the planet and providing a high quality of life for its people. Achieving sustainable solutions calls for stewardship, with everyone taking responsibility for solving the problems of today and tomorrow. Individuals, communities, businesses and governments are all stewards of the environment.

Sustainability is an attempt to provide the best outcomes for the human and natural environments both now and into the indefinite future. It relates to the continuity of economic, social, institutional and environmental aspects of human society, as well as the non-human environment. It is intended to be a means to ensure that societies, its members and its economies, are able to meet their needs and express their greatest potential in the present, while preserving biodiversity and natural ecosystems, and planning and acting for the ability to maintain these ideals in a very long term.

What does this have to do with waste and recycling?

Frank Ackerman, researcher, author and environmental advocate, provides perhaps the best answer in his 1997 book, Why Do We Recycle? “If our goals in life include a commitment to do the right thing for society and the environment, recycling is one of the most accessible, tangible symbols of that commitment…

Why do we recycle? In the short run, before we are all dead, we recycle (and reduce waste and reuse things) partly in order to avoid the need for new landfills and incinerators. But there is much more to it than a dislike of disposal facilities. At times, recycling saves money; the struggle to make it cost-effective is a vital and ongoing one…

Recycling lessens the need for virgin materials, and reduces pollution from material extraction and manufacturing. Some types of recycling prevent litter or reduce landfill emissions. Local recycling efforts may provide a basis for new businesses to use recovered materials, creating local jobs and incomes.

As important as all these benefits are, they are not the whole story… For that we must turn to the vague feeling about consumption and waste, the desires for frugality and public participation, the belief that materials are ultimately scarce and must be conserved. In the long run, the materials we use freely today will be scarce, and our descendants will have to create a strikingly different, renewable economy. Contemporary recycling points toward the far-off future...

The practice of recycling pushes us in the right direction, toward the development of the technologies of sustainable material use, and toward the creation of less materialistic, more socially and environmentally engaged ways of living.”