Yves Behar Quotes

Philips is committed to the circular economy and is applying its principles throughout the organization. We are redesigning our products and looking at ways to capture their residual value.

I mean, if cans can be recycled, why not spirits?

Reducing and reusing take nothing more than a rethink on the way we shop, and using our imagination with the things that we might once have considered junk.

One man's trash is another man's treasure, and the by-product from one food can be perfect for making another.

There is no such thing as waste. It is just a question of whether we know how to use something or not.

We should make things that people don't want to throw away.

Freecycle groups match people who have things they want to get rid of with people who can use them.

We can't have landfills forever, and we can't ask others to accept our trash.

Even clingfilm - if it's gone over a salad bowl, take it off, use it again. I wash out carrier bags; I save brown paper from parcels. I save string; I save ribbons. I separate all my bits and pieces.

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.

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

When you have all these traces of trash moving around, you can ask yourself how can we make the system more efficient. Then we can make better decisions. And perhaps we will not throw away the plastic bottles that go every day to the dump.

Not everything needs to be recycled.

The purpose - where I start - is the idea of use. It is not recycling, it's reuse.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

Nobody likes to throw stuff away. It's just antithetical to our sense of being a person. But we're all habituated to that way of living today.

After all, does it make sense to be chucking things like glass, paper, cardboard, wood, metals, plastics, and food waste into holes in the ground? No, it doesn't; especially when someone will pay you good money to take them off your hands or, in the case of wood and food waste, when you can turn them into renewable energy.

We can't think in terms of designing products that we throw over the wall to customers, but instead, we need to design products that are upgradable and maintainable and that can be mined for materials and components that can be reused.

If we want a world that is truly sustainable, we have to realize that something old can also be perfect. Otherwise, we'll just throw away our yesterday.

We need to throw away less, recycle a lot more and turn much of the rest into energy.

I always grew up watching things transform, and a lot of that was what we would call trash.

There is no such thing as garbage, just useful stuff in the wrong place.

If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.

Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.

It's like recycling: selling old clothes to help make new ones.