Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States (Urban and Industrial Environments) Paperback – Illustrated, August 16, 2013

Excellent research on role of recycling ideologies and how they may be deflecting citizen activism from more effective activities targeting industrial waste, legislation, regulation, and bio wastes.

Lots of good information.

Excellent critical examination of recycling.

I loaded this onto my Kindle and the text did not flow correctly. Words at the end of each line were cut off. Never encountered this with a Kindle book on my device.

The waste/recycling world has a lot of informative journal/magazine publications, but it can be hard to find an entire book dedicated to the industry and its achievements. This book looks at landfill diversion and employment statistics, policy successes and failures, and ties these in with the wavering history of public opinion toward waste, recycling, and materials management - all in a United States context. This is a ton of information, so reading and processing it took a while, but was well worth it. I came away from the book with a more concrete idea of what it will take - in tons, technology, and policy - to ACTUALLY move toward zero waste. For example, MacBride presents astonishing evidence for how little attention is paid to industrial waste tonnages in the overall scheme of materials management policy. I know personally that the materials management industry is already aware of this problem and moving to change, but MacBride provides the numbers and history behind how the problem developed in the first place - very interesting.Some of the status quo recycling programs that we know and love have reached a point of diminishing returns, so it's time we turn to a hard-hitting mix of policies and market drivers that can properly handle the crazy assortment of materials that flow out of the homes and businesses in this country. MacBride lays out a policy framework for doing just that. Though my day-to-day work is at the community scale, Recycling Reconsidered has me thinking more intelligently about long-term impacts and scalability of zero waste initiatives.

This book answered many questions I had about recycling, such as why we can't recycle Styrofoam or plastic bags (too light to be profitable and difficult to process dirty). It also gives a history of urban waste disposal and recycling in America, explaining what went right and how corporations looking out for their interests hinder the process. Finally, it presents well-researched and thoughtful proposed solutions to our waste issues.

It has some useful information in it, but it is written in such a way that is hard to understand. The sentences are very long and hard to follow, making the information unclear and difficult to understand.