contact us

Resource Efficiency

Reverse Garbage advocate a "cradle to cradle" approach to resouce use. We need to consider the whole life cycle of any product, including its design, manufacture, packaging, transport, use, and then re-use or recycling.

Industrial development has traditionally involved linear material flows. Materials are extracted from the earth, used for a limited period and then returned to the earth or to atmosphere in a different form as "waste". This linear system of resource flows has massive social and ecological costs.

Reverse Garbage aims to keep materials cycling within the economy, thus reducing the demand for primary raw materials as well as reducing the burden on the earth associated with the assimilation of wastes.

In a practical sense, we encourage:

• Reduced consumption in the first instance
• Re-use of material in the same application
• Re-use of material in a different application
• Recycling as a last resort.

  
  Despite the growing awareness of the social and ecological costs associated with linear resource flows, there remains an abundance of useful materials that are wasted despite clear possibilities for re-use or re-cycling.

  This has provided a real opportunity for arbitrage - taking (wasted) materials from people who place little or no value on them, and selling them to people who place a higher value on them. This is essentially the principle that Reverse Garbage uses in its efforts to reduce waste and to encourage the creative and efficient use of resources.