BIR prepares manifesto for Global Recycling Day

The Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) has authored what it calls a “global manifesto” written to help promote the world’s first Global Recycling Day, which is March 18, 2018. The manifesto urges its readers to consider how the items people discard and the goods society recycles “have the power to combat climate change and, potentially, change the world in which we live.”

The document has been created in an effort led by Ranjit Baxi, president of BIR, and supported by Dr. Katharina Kummer Peiry, a former executive secretary of the Basel Convention, and Philippe Chalmin, professor of economic history at Paris-Dauphine University.

The manifesto is titled “Recycling: The Seventh Resource Manifesto” and proceeds from the premise that the Earth has six primary natural resources – water, air, oil, natural gas, coal and minerals. These are finite resources, but there is a seventh resource in the form of recyclable goods, including metals, textiles, paper, plastics and other materials that can be used time and again, sometimes indefinitely.

The manifesto also asks world leaders and individuals to rethink the word “waste” and to put true economic and environmental value behind recyclables.   

“Primary resources, as we all know, are finite,” says Baxi. “It is our collective duty, across the globe, to preserve, respect and make the best use of virgin resources. My goal in envisaging, and now launching, Global Recycling Day is to show the world that there is a seventh resource, as economically viable as, and more sustainable than, the six key primary resources.”

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