There’s also incineration. 
Don’t dismiss incineration too quickly. Landfill generates significant methane (a potent greenhouse gas as I’m sure you know) which incineration doesn’t. Add carbon capture and storage (CCS) and it becomes arguably the best solution for mixed hard-to-recycle waste. CCS isn’t cheap but it does work, and has got to be part of the solution for hard to decarbonise industries.
And if heat recovery is applied to incineration for district heating, then that is an added benefit. Another alternative is pyrolysis, for example, it can be used to make carbon black from car tyres.
That being said, all of these use more energy that repairing things that need minor work done. More extensive repairs where more parts need replacing, might also still be worthwhile.
Im afraid I’m not a fan of incineration having been involved in campaigning against them for over 30 years including modern gasification / pyrolysis. These large scale monsters need constant feeding and therefore encourage business as usual.
I agree it may appear to be a better solution to landfill but changing manufacturing to a cradle to cradle process - more circular economy is the way forward. Many councils got trapped in long term public / private partnerships (PPP / PFI) over these which stifles better options, keeping companies from innovating processes.
Also large scale Carbon Capture and Storage is still under scrutiny. We have much better options and it looks like manufacturers are coming around.
I saw this brilliant list of our options during a recent Circular Economy Workshop:
Refuse
Rethink
Reduce
Reuse
Repair
Refurbish
Remanufacture
Repurpose
Recycle
Recover
At the bottom was landfill / incineration. Last option.
4 Likes
The Restarters team have made some excellent graphics to share recently. I wonder if they could take this list and turn it into an attractive poster we could download and display in our Repair events?
2 Likes
I’ll see if I can find where they got the list from
Please don’t imagine I’m any great fan of incineration. But I suspect there’s a tendency to think that it’s GOTTA be BAD, particularly if you’ve heard horror stories of unregulated open incineration of electricals in 3rd world countries, or if there’s a NIMBY element to your thinking. Yes, it’s BAD, but landfill, the default, is probably worse, and can be significantly less bad if coupled with carbon capture and storage.
Also, don’t swallow uncritically the idea that CCS is unproven, or still under scrutiny. My neice is Technical Lead Consultant for Carbon Capture at Wood (formerly Foster Wheeler) and has worked on major projects worlwide such as in oil refinery decarbonisation and CCS retrofitting in cement and lime industries. It’s proven and it WORKS! She told me about a study which indicated that the Port Talbot steel works CO2 emissions (the largest single emitter in the UK) could be reduced by 80% with CCS. But it costs. And without regulatory incentives, it’s hard to get it past the bean counters.
The long and the short of it is that I believe we need to apply every means at our disposal to mitigate the climate catastrophe. If we say wouldn’t it be better to use electric funaces for steel production, then of course it would. But it’ll take time and a lot of money, not only for new funaces but also for the electricity supply and distribution to power them. We need solutions NOW. We can’t afford to let the perfect be the enemy of the good by thinking CCS and other interim solutions will deincentivise the ideal solution. If we do, we’ll be doomed to failure. We need to throw EVERYTHING we’ve got at the problem NOW! And yes, of course, that absolutely includes all of the things in your excellent list of re-this and re-that!
Great list Lee-Ann!
Reminds me of a similar topic here from a couple of years ago, where we came up with a similar list:
@JGC Keep Britian Tidy produced some nice graphics of a redesigned waste hierarchy last year:
It’s a bit of a shame it doesn’t explicitly mention repair, although it’s hinted at by the screwdriver, needle and thread in the ‘use it again, and again…’ section. But might still be nice to put up at events (and you could even add ‘and fix it when it breaks’ in marker 
)
Full details here:
2 Likes
4 posts were split to a new topic: Animations promoting repair
Nice one, thanks!
Having more suitable graphics for posters and socials is a great way you can help resource us to help shift people’s thinking.
1 Like
The scheme is now live with some 15 bins ‘stickered’. Obviously no statistics yet as we need to identify and record what items have been brought into our Repair Cafés rather than recycled via the bins.
strong text
1 Like
That’s wonderful - its bound to encourage repair, I hope you start to see the results soon.