Rohini Nilekani Quotes

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.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

India's waste problem is gigantic, and with its economy growing steadily, it will be compounded manifold.

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.

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.

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.

Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.

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.

In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under 9 feet of manure.

I'm a trash can. I eat whatever makes me happy.

Unmanageable waste has turned into a worldwide crisis. No matter how much local authorities do, no matter the level of public cooperation, no matter how much is recycled, the problem continues to grow.

Sooner or later, all magazines end up in the toilet.

I just think we need to find a way, because we don't dispose of them very well; they have very bad chemicals in them. If we could just find a way, maybe start at a small step with eliminating batteries perhaps in small electronic devices, and then possibly in the future go bigger, that would be great.

Plastic waste is undeniably a big issue, and Europeans need to act together to tackle this problem because plastic waste ends up in our air, our soil, our oceans, and in our food.

The river of sludge will go on and on. It isn't about me.

The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.

Conservation is important... water comes at a cost.

We face a simple choice. Either we go back to the days when everything was disposable and landfill dumps consumed our countryside at an increasing pace, or we recognise that we have limited resources and need to use them wisely and sustainably.

The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else.

Tearing down an old house and building a new one is the most wasteful thing we do as humans.

The truth is that it was local councils who asked for the power and the freedom to try different ways of encouraging residents to reduce the amount they throw way away, and it was Labour that gave them these powers.

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.

Cheap electronics are not built to be repaired. They're just used and then discarded.