Editor's Focus -- One Step at a Time

Progress is not only hard to measure and to define, it can also be difficult to distinguish while it is taking place. Even when most of us can agree that a certain widely accepted practice or technique indeed represents an advancement, enough time has to pass before historians and students can trace a timeline of that progress.

However, reaching agreement as to what progress is hardly ever renders a unanimous verdict. While the vast majority considers routine passenger jet travel from New York to Chicago in under three hours a sign of incredible progress, contrarians can be found who lament the fuel consumption or the lost joys of overland travel by horseback.

Advocates of recycling have long considered it a progressive activity. In the long-term view, it is hard to argue against the notion of sustaining and re-using Earth’s finite resources. Where agreeable parties can disagree is in the details and timing of recycling practices.

Using air travel as a comparison, the advances that have been made carried with them considerable costs. Early aviators took staggering risks, and even early air travel passengers took more risks than the airline operators at that time may have preferred to admit. Certainly, flying as a form of travel still has its limitations on the cost-benefit side, with very few of us commuting daily via the skies (as the creators of The Jetsons envisioned).

In any number of ways, recycling makes sense. The metals industry has known this for a long time, the paper industry has adopted this as conventional wisdom, and makers of many other materials have taken tremendous strides to incorporate recycled feedstock among their raw materials.

Recycling advocates must remain vigilant about keeping corporate and governmental institutions aware of recycling options, best practices and responsibilities.

What is quietly encouraging, however, is the level to which recycling practices have shifted away from the curious and toward the mainstream.

Plenty of governmental and corporate decisions still can work against current recycling agendas. Landfills are still open for business and are likely to be for the foreseeable future. Our society is based on allowing such decisions to be made, with avenues left open for public input and reaction.

Ultimately, though, resource consumption trends are the trump card that will champion the cause of recycling.

People worldwide are consuming more packaged goods and saving to buy durable goods. The strain on commodity markets has lifted the value of most secondary commodities. Recyclers know pricing rides in waves, but the underlying demand fundamental may be in place for some time.

For recyclers, the encouraging part is that somewhere down the road, it seems likely that advocating for recycling will be about as necessary as advocating for quick travel routes.