Alex Steffen Quotes

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

I'm really interested in how you create a whole new economy of recycling. It's literally the 'underground economy.' All this stuff that on the surface creates growth and profit, ends up with waste, junk, and CO2. So how do you make it economic to bring new players into the ball game?

Our entire economy is based on waste. We produce stuff we don’t need… How far is this going to go? I have a 5 word answer for you: Zero waste equals zero commerce.

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

The industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company's bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy.

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

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.

I have always been interested in garbage: What it says about us. What in there embarrasses us, and what we can't bear to part with. Where it goes and how much of it there is. How it endures. What it might be like to work with it every day.

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.

Globalised manufacturing and procurement mean that a lot of high-polluting, heavy duty jobs are transferred to China. We will ask major companies, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft and IBM to put pressure on their Chinese suppliers.

We're manufacturing to meet the demands of our own people but, in the meantime, for the entire world as well, and that definitely put a lot of extra pressure on our environment.

My father was in the paper recycling business back before they called it recycling.

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

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

Paper making was the first of the recycling industries.

Our myopic focus on producing and consuming as cheaply as possible has created a linear economy in which objects are briefly used and then discarded as waste.

Restaurants should be forced to recycle their leftovers for animal consumption - and should create fewer leftovers in the first place.

Any waste stream in our society can be turned into a revenue stream. It's turning the lemons in our society into lemonade.

Reducing our personal impact on the Earth via our ecological footprint, stop driving cars, eat less meat, all these things matter.

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

The fashion business has to change. There's too much waste.

Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things - on the right products and services and systems - instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them "right," with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.

Everything we make pollutes. The most responsible thing we can do is to make each product as well as we know how so it lasts as long as possible.

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

The throwaway economy that has been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration, now itself headed for the junk heap of history.