Janine Benyus Quotes

Just because you have a piece of trash and you throw it away and it gets hauled away, it doesn't mean that it's not affecting someone else.

While many of us use beauty products every single day, we fail to recognize how much waste this can actually create if the empty bottles aren't recycled.

There's a value in used electronic equipment, and currently, there are small, domestic recyclers that process this equipment safely. But they have a hard time competing with facilities overseas that have few, if any, environmental and safety standards.

E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the United States and can pose serious environmental and health problems here and around the world when not handled properly.

When Woodstock ended on Monday morning, over 600 acres of garbage was left behind on Max Yasgur's farm. It took over 400 volunteers and $100,000 to remove it all.

A newspaper that you're not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn't think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.

Some trash is recycled, some is thrown away, some ends up where it shouldn't end up.

The film business creates a large amount of waste, and I'm not immune to waste in the business.

If they [the Federal government] can't handle the [toxic] waste, they shouldn't generate it.

We can no longer throw our waste away because there is no away.

In theory, recycling poop is the perfect solution to the one truly unavoidable byproduct of human civilization.

People mean well. But there is an unintended consequence of giving people bigger recycling bins and more opportunities to recycle—soon they want to recycle everything.

From my travels around the world I have seen how much damage and pollution is done by the careless disposal of waste. It is also evident that we in the West produce far more and throw away far more than the developing world, almost without thinking

I'm mad keen on recycling because I'm worried about the next generation and where all this waste we're producing is going. It has to stop. I wash out my plastic containers and recycle envelopes, everything I possibly can.

If we have any hope of finding ways for seven billion people to live well on planet with finite resources, we have to learn to use our resources efficiently. Plastic bags are neither efficient nor environmentally friendly.

I come from garbage.

One of the things that I've always thought I would like to do is to develop an environmental index. Then people can measure their own environmental performance on an index as they do in other ways.

We need to address our Nation's mounting garbage problem by generating less garbage, particularly paper waste.

The coal mining industry is very destructive and it doesn't have to be.

But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

We prefer synthetic rather than natural materials. Natural products are almost too valuable. Wood is much harder to produce than metal. And metal is recyclable, while wood isn't.

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

Obviously, waste disposal is an enormous and fantastic industry.

Years ago, we all talked about recycling and not dumping things down your drain and all of that, but talking doesn't help much. Basically, it's going to have to be legislation because the impact is so huge and diversified.

As the words of my book, 'The Bloodless Revolution,' accumulated, I envisaged a parallel growth: the stack of pages they would have to be printed on, thousands of times over; every page representing a slice of forest, a belch of fumes and a squirt of toxic ink.