Green Trance: Post-consumer Waste Recycling
Wikipedia: Post-consumer waste – Post-consumer waste is a waste type produced by the end consumer of a material stream; that is, where the waste-producing use did not involve the production of another product 1
This includes but is not limited to the following items: Aluminum cans, packaging (carton, plastic, etc.) Junk mail, other paper product like office paper waste, food items (kitchen scraps, food past it’s ‘use by’ date, etc.), metals (electronics, cars, etc).2 In other words any product that can be recycled after it’s been used and in most cases (unfortunately) would be discarded (in contrast to pre-consumer waste. These are products that have never reached the end-user/consumer consisting of ‘not up-to-standard’ products that would usually be discarded but have never been used 3).
Usually a product will state: this has been made with XX % of post-consumer materials, for example, Paper towels. If they have been made with an X amount of post-consumer materials it might mean that they recycled used office paper, cardboard and used paper products to create the new paper towels. Examples of this can be found in many products like Seventh Generation, Green Forest, Small Steps, and many more (nice list, for paper/kitchen towels specifically, can be found here )
So that’s it, the first post in the “Green Trance” series. Feel free to comment, add or leave remarks, they are always welcome.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-consumer_waste
2 http://www.oregonmetro.gov/index.cfm/go/by.web/id=3369
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre_consumer
