NOT RECYCLING
We are very wasteful societies, churning quickly from resources through products to rubbish. In doing so we disturb the more circular systems operating in biophysical ecologies. The 'natural' response is therefore for us to mimic these cycles, closing the loop by making use of our waste.
To this end, even though recycled materials and products are in many ways doubly artificial, they have become icons for the naturalisation of our ways of living and working. The recycled-look is now an image of 'greenness'.
However, recycling is rarely a closed loop, especially in terms of the energy required. And in many ways, recycling validates the rapidity of our product cycles. This is evident in how near most recycled products are to junk: a use has been invented for a recycled material rather than an existing useful product being made out of recycled materials.
A sustainment is much more about extending the life of existing products, than it is about reducing the ecological impact of our wastefulness. Re-using materials and products delivers much more substantial sustainments than recycling.
This raises another point about sustainments. To re-use materials and products requires designing them very carefully in the first place. The same goes for recycling. Recyclability only becomes a sustainment when it assured outcome of a pre-designed system, an infrastructure that ensures that products and materials do get returned to the place where they will get recycled into other useful, long-life products. Sustainments are then designed ecologies.
