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Environmental Degradation: Plastic V/s. Paper

Ms. Asema Siddiqui, Mahararshtra College, Mumbai.

to limit its recycling - Paper does not recycle indenitely. Its bres become shorter at each
recycling, which reduces the quality of the product. This is one more reason to print only when
necessary and always print double-sided. Publishers should limit the print of advertisements.
Electronic media should be used to market and advertise products. Newspapers should be
solely published for printing news and not tenders and advertisements. Give books away. Just
like toys, they can be given to associations that will redistribute them to people who need them.
Avoid disposable products. Opt for handkerchiefs or fabric towels rather than paper towels
and paper napkins. “If we are not in a good relationship with the environment, the
environment will be destroyed, and we will lose our ground.”- Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Chipko

Movement.
Recycling, as we know and is practiced today is based on two assumptions:
§ That our modern-day industrial society and the products we create all have a negative

impact on the environment; and
§ That we can mitigate this impact by practicing 'reduce, reuse, re-cycle' or 'do more with less.'

While both assumptions are correct, within the current industrial arrangements, there is a new
concept that questions this framework. In their 2002 visionary book 'Cradle to Cradle:
Remaking the Way We Make Things” William McDonough and Michael Baumgart present a
new way of looking at industrial society and re-cycling. Re-cycling, the way it is practiced today,
is actually 'down-cycling' or cradle-to-grave recycling. We try to practice 'reduce, reuse, re-
cycle' to lessen the negative effect of our wasteful lifestyle and consumerist products on the
environment, but the products we create out of recycled materials are either inferior in quality
(because of material degradation or contamination) or use only a very small fraction of the
original material (the rest ending up as toxic waste in our landlls).

Cradle-to-cradle re-cycling mirrors the sustainability of nature, itself. When a tree creates a
thousand owers to reproduce or replicate itself, it is a highly likely that only one of those
owers will result in a new tree. But we don't nd the 999 other owers wasted since these are
all returned to the earth as nutrients to help begin the tree's next reproduction cycle.

Cradle-to-cradle recycling is the incorporation of this very natural and beautiful concept of
sustainability into our industrial production cycles right at the very start of the process – the
design or conceptualization of the nished product. Architects, designers, and engineers will
have to provide for the eventual disposition of their products from the very beginning, how
these products (with all their components) can be re-cycled or re-introduced into the
production cycle as 'technical nutrients.' Nothing wasted, everything reusable or recyclable –
that is the essence of cradle-to-cradle recycling.

“The difculties of life are intended to make
us better, not bitter.” (Anonymous) 100
2019-20