by Patricia Stewart

Created on: February 14, 2009

Most people are familiar with recycling, to the point of recognizing that it is a process of giving materials a new purpose, sometimes in a whole new form. It is one response to the ever increasing amount of "left over," material that is thrown away each year. But to really make a dent in avoiding that "landfill monster," people need to begin making their choices based upon "Precycling."

Precycling is a consumer's practice of preferring and purchasing materials that are minimally packaged, automatically reusable, logn lasting and/or recyclable. Often this refers to the amount of plastic that is used in packaging, as it never decays. Music companies were famous for putting a little tiny CD or tape inside a large plastic sleeve, which was difficult to get into anyway. It was easier for marketing and display purposes, but made for a great deal of waste. They have shifted their practices some to minimizing the size of their packaging, and stores keep reusable plastic display cases for those products.

Consumers can keep precycling in mind when they shop by looking particulary at the size of the box they will be carrying relative to the size of the object they are buying. Like the old days when the "prize inside," was hidden in the cereal inside the cereal boxes, some packages are so filled with fillers, papers and other packaging materials, all to protect a smaller item that might be broken in shipment inside the much larger container.

But precycling can also be done by choosing items that have little or no packaging material. Or choosing the item that is wrapped in a biodegradable or resusable container, rather than one that might be contained in a shiny plastic package. One simple way to precycle is to buy a whole block of cheese and cut it yourself, rather than separately wrapped slices. The convenience may be nice, but the amount of permanent waste is disproportionate to your ease of use, in most cases.

Solid waste is a tremendous problem, and one that can be avoided with precycling, recycling and wise purchasing. In our family, we produce one large bag of trash each week, but three or four containers of recyclables, and a daily trip to the compost bin. This is possible because of our awareness of the whole "trash cycle," and do our best to look at both the front end of a product's life, it's production and packaging, and it's end of purpose life, is it recyclable, reusable or extremely well made so that it will serve us for a long time. These become conditioned thoughts, with practice. That's where precycling comes into play.

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