Some waste hierarchies propose that there is a “Fourth R” after “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” One calls it “Recover;” others, “Re-think” or “Restore.” Instead, I propose these steps together comprise the “Next Three Rs.”

With the original Three Rs, the end goal is waste elimination. You start with Reduction, because it is the first step - reduction practices keep things from ever entering the waste cycle. If you cannot reduce, you reuse, and so on. You progress through the original steps in order, and each step increases your waste from zero.

Even if you’ve gone through the Three Rs, you don’t have to give up because something can’t be recycled. You might be able to Recover a portion of what you’re throwing away, which is still better than committing it all to a landfill. Once you’ve done all you can with the waste at hand, you can go back and Re-think the processes that produced it. Lastly, when you have re-thought everything and reached a place where you are reusing, recycling, or recovering all the waste you’re producing, you can attempt the most challenging R of all - Restoring.

Recovering. Recycling, of course, means converting wasted items back into raw materials. It’s not the same as the R before it, because it uses additional energy and produces additional waste. An example would be re-using a jelly jar as a drinking glass, versus recycling the jar so it can be melted down and made into a new product. Recovery, then, is not the same as Recycling, because it also requires more processing, and produces more waste (although not as much as landfilling would). An example of Recovery would be donating an automobile to a salvage yard. You are still contributing to the waste stream, because the whole car cannot be recycled, but parts from the car can be recovered and reused, which reduces the amount of overall waste that is actually landfilled.  Recovering even a portion of what you throw away is better than trashing it all.

Rethinking. I had the chance to see Bill McDonough, a pioneer in cradle-to-cradle design, speak at EnvironDesign, where he talked about a factory that was interested in reducing its waste. The factory sourced its water from a nearby river, and McDonough suggested moving its effluent upstream from its intake (the equivalent of getting your tap water from your toilet!). Now, this is not necessarily the best solution for every company that wants to go green, but you can see how having to source from your waste stream would certainly make you rethink what you’re throwing away. The point is, the planet is a closed-loop system. Everything we produce, with the exception of satellites, stays right here. Technically, there is no “away”! It can get kind of scary to think about where things come from and where they go when we’re done using them, but the fact is, we haven’t been thinking about these things for a long time, and we’re going to have to start. The companies that start thinking about them sooner will be more prepared for resource scarcity than the companies that start thinking about them later. There is also the raw materials cost advantage: when you have no waste, there is no money lost on raw materials you paid for but never used. If you can actually profit off your waste, you are doing even better.  A Safe and Sustainable World, for example, mentions a project that took waste material from a brewery (spent hops) and created five salable products from it: animal feed, mushrooms, earthworms, mesclun (lettuce), and a soil amendment!

Restoration. In the green field, there is a lot of talk about an enterprise’s “ecological footprint.” This footprint represents the net impact of your business on the planet, and for most companies, it’s a negative net impact, meaning that it probably destroys more than it restores. This doesn’t mean your business is “bad”; it’s really just the way commerce has evolved (we can’t all live off the fat of the land, unfortunately). The sustainability movement is an effort to encourage businesses to reduce their footprint to “zero,” meaning, their net impact would be neutral. Restoration, however, moves beyond neutrality, encouraging businesses to strive for a positive net impact. How does a business do this? Start with the triple bottom line: ask what your business can do to restore damaged natural, social, and economic systems in your area. Can you donate time or money to rebuild a wetland or playground, or support economic development through networking or sourcing? Any of these would be a good place to start.

In closing, just remember, your imagination will be your greatest asset, no matter what “R” you’re tackling. Don’t be afraid to take small steps; they do add up!

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